xml-dev - Re: Obfuscating XML with namespaces

[John Cowan <jcowan@reutershealth.com>]

Amy Lewis wrote:

> Why are namespace declarations allowed to appear at any level in a
> document?

Basically so that independent components, each of which is responsible
for some part of a document, can generate their part in isolation from
the others.  If all namespaces had to be declared at the top, as in the
earliest versions of Namespaces, all components would have to
have global access to spit out their chosen namespace declarations in
advance, and some sort of cooperation to make sure they did not choose
conflicting prefixes.

> Since W3C seems really allergic to the
> idea of allowing any semantic meaning be attached to namespaces

Not at all.  The Namespace Rec, though, is meant to be low-level.

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