xml-dev - Re: XML Schemas: Best Practices

[Ronald Bourret <rpbourret@rpbourret.com>]

"Roger L. Costello" wrote:
> WHY is it good to "shield the user from the namespace of those elements
> that come from the common address schema"?  Some people would argue that
> it is better to expose the namespace of the common address elements in
> the instance document. UNDER WHAT CIRCUMSTANCES would you want to shield
> the user from the namespaces and under what circumstances would you want
> to explicitly expose the namespaces?

I came in late on this discussion, so excuse me if this has already been
mentioned.

One thing that could suffer due to hiding namespaces is code reuse. In
particular, any code that processes a particular element/attribute based
on URI + local name won't be able recognize that element/attribute if
the namespace is hidden.

Whether this is a serious problem is not clear -- a similar problem
already exists for code designed to process a given complex type,
regardless of the name of the element. Thus, the general way to write
such code might be to always require its initialization with the correct
name(s).

-- 
Ronald Bourret
Programming, Writing, and Training
XML, Databases, and Schemas
http://www.rpbourret.com