xml-dev - Re: Namespace question

[Norman Gray <norman@astro.gla.ac.uk>]

Greetings,

On Thu, 6 Apr 2000, Linda Grimaldi wrote:

> Am fairly new to this mailing list, and I must admit, the sheer volume and 
> intensity of the messages is very impressive.  I'm looking forward to 
> participating more actively.  But, for the moment, I hope you have patience 
> for a relatively newbie question, to wit;   How would I go about 
> registering an XML namespace designation?  Is it an IANA thing?

Because it's based on a URL prefix, you don't have to register anything.

You simply pick a URL (well, actually a URI, but the difference perhaps
doesn't amount to much in this context) which refers to a resource
you have control over.  That's the namespace name.  You might pick
`http://www.earthlink.net/my/path/to/DTD' for example.

Anyone who wants to refer to elements in that namespace can do so with
a declaration like

   <x xmlns:blurble='http://www.earthlink.net/my/path/to/DTD'>
   ...
   </x>

so that `blurble:' is now the namespace prefix they'll use in their
document.

The crucial points are:

  - The URL doesn't have to point to anything, it's simply a means of
    generating a unique string.  However, it's obviously sensible if
    it points to a DTD or something.
  - You don't choose the namespace prefix -- that's up to the person
    who's writing the document.

All the best,

Norman

-- 
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Norman Gray                        http://www.astro.gla.ac.uk/users/norman/
Physics and Astronomy, University of Glasgow, UK     norman@astro.gla.ac.uk


***************************************************************************
This is xml-dev, the mailing list for XML developers.
To unsubscribe, mailto:majordomo@xml.org&BODY=unsubscribe%20xml-dev
List archives are available at http://xml.org/archives/xml-dev/
***************************************************************************