xml-dev - FW: Namespaces, XML in Browsers

[Andrew Layman <andrewl@microsoft.com>]

Richard Tobin privately sent me the following clarifying mail.  We both
thought it would be a useful update to XML-Dev readers, so with his
permission I am forwarding it on.

-----Original Message-----
From: richard@cogsci.ed.ac.uk [mailto:richard@cogsci.ed.ac.uk]
Sent: Friday, November 17, 2000 4:04 AM
To: Andrew Layman
Subject: Re: Namespaces, XML in Browsers


In article <8v2dsd$2ssi$1@pc-news.cogsci.ed.ac.uk> you write:
>6.	From the point of view of the XML Infoset, a namespace declaration
>is not an attribute but a namespace declaration.  (See
>http://www.w3.org/TR/xml-infoset#infoitem.namespace-decl)

This has changed somewhat in recent working group drafts.  The
attributes declaring namespaces and the namespaces in scope are now
represented by different kinds of info item.  The former are
represented as Attribute Info Items, and are stored in the [namespace
attributes] property of elements; the latter are represented by
simpler Namespace Info Items containing only a prefix and namespace
name and are stored in the [in-scope namespaces] property.

It is expected that many namespace-aware specifications will refer
only to the [in-scope namespaces].  For example, XSLT's namespace axis
corresponds to this property.  The [namespace attributes] property is
for specifications - like the DOM - that want to access the namespace
declarations as attributes, hence the name.

-- Richard