OASIS Mailing List ArchivesView the OASIS mailing list archive below
or browse/search using MarkMail.

 


Help: OASIS Mailing Lists Help | MarkMail Help

 


 

   Namespace handling in XML Processors

[ Lists Home | Date Index | Thread Index ]
  • From: <schen@falconwing.com>
  • To: xml-dev <xml-dev@ic.ac.uk>
  • Date: Sun, 29 Aug 1999 11:26:19 -0400 (EWT)

Speaking of namespaces,

It's very confusing as to what is regarded as correct behavior by XML
processors when encountering a document with namespaces.
All the standard seems to do is to allow use of the same element names
without conflict.

As has been stated in the thread [Fwd: ATTN: Please comment on XHTML
(before it's too late)], namespaces are explicitly not defined to be
either schemas or DTDs, although the standard doesn't preclude it either.

So two questions:

1) If an XML processor was semantically interpreting an XML document but
encounters an unknown namespace, is it mandated to ignore all elements and
attributes in that namespace?  I thought this was the case, but after
re-reading the standard I see it's not defined.  If this is not
standardized, can anyone say what is currently the common practice?

2) How should a validating XML parser deal with namespaces?  This doesn't
seem to be defined very clearly.  I can see that we can include namespace
declarations in the DTD external and internal subsets, so I guess that if
I have a document mixing two namespaces I would have the external DTD
point to the one for the "primary" namespace and then use the internal
subset to override the external DTD to provide for insertion of elements
and attributes using the second namespace.  But this can rapidly get out
of hand with mixing of even more namespaces.  Is there any better
mechanism for this, or are any planned?  

. . . Sean.



xml-dev: A list for W3C XML Developers. To post, mailto:xml-dev@ic.ac.uk
Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/xml-dev/ and on CD-ROM/ISBN 981-02-3594-1
To (un)subscribe, mailto:majordomo@ic.ac.uk the following message;
(un)subscribe xml-dev
To subscribe to the digests, mailto:majordomo@ic.ac.uk the following message;
subscribe xml-dev-digest
List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa@ic.ac.uk)






 

News | XML in Industry | Calendar | XML Registry
Marketplace | Resources | MyXML.org | Sponsors | Privacy Statement

Copyright 2001 XML.org. This site is hosted by OASIS