xml-dev - Re: namespace prefixes within attribute values

[richard@cogsci.ed.ac.uk (Richard Tobin)]

>other things, it isn't clear that applications - which should be processing
>these attribute values - will ever get the prefix information, given some
>strongly held beliefs that prefixes are throwaway info for the parser only.

Applications that need to interpret namespace prefixes in attributes
(or text data) will of course have to use a parser that provides the
necessary information.

And it to be expected that many parsers will provide it, since the
binding of prefixes to URIs is a (peripheral) property of element
information items in the infoset (http://www.w3.org/TR/xml-infoset).

> At the same time, the Namespaces spec doesn't tell parsers that they
>should examine attribute values for namespace prefixes.  (There's no
>warning about using colons within attribute values in XML 1.0, either.)

And that's how it should be.  That an attribute value is interpreted
as having a namespace prefix is an application-level decision, just
like whether an attribute is interpreted as a URI (which similarly
needs base URI information, again an infoset property of elements).

-- Richard
-- 
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"The Internet is really just a series of bottlenecks joined by high
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