xml-dev - RE: SAX2: Namespace separators

[David Megginson <david@megginson.com>]

Andrew Layman writes:

 > RDF concatenates a namespace's URI plus a local name to form a new
 > URI by simple concatenation, with no intervening separator, true
 > enough, but RDF also imposes a rule that all namespace URIs must
 > end in "/" so that no ambiguity is possible.

I cannot find any such constraint in the REC, but I might have missed
it; in any case, the Namespace URI for RDF itself,
"http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#", does not follow that
rule.

 > I have seen the following rule proposed, and it appears both robust
 > and compatible with RDF:
 > 
 > To compose a namespace's URI plus a local name into a new string
 > that is a URI reference, concatenate the strings directly if the
 > URI ends in "/" or "?", else concatenate the strings but separate
 > them with a "#".

That's an interesting suggestion, but I don't think that it's
compatible with the Namespaces REC.  As far as I understand Namespaces 
in XML,

  <a xmlns="http://www.foo.com"/>

and

  <a xmlns="http://www.foo.com#"/>

have (potentially) distinct element names, and it would be wrong for a
generic processor to lose the distinction (though an application might
choose to do so).


All the best,


David

-- 
David Megginson                 david@megginson.com
           http://www.megginson.com/

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