Re: Unprefixed attribute names in RDF

[David Megginson <david@megginson.com>]

Tim Bray writes:
 > At 12:41 PM 07/01/01 -0800, Joe English wrote:
 > >Am I correct in assuming that, in RDF, unqualified attribute
 > >names are treated as though they had the same namespace name
 > >as the element to which they belong?
 > ....
 > >I also notice that other W3C Recommendations seem to use
 > >different conventions -- XSLT uniformly uses unqualified
 > >attribute names, and XLINK seems to always use qualified
 > >ones.
 > 
 > Seems to me it's OK to go either way as long as you make
 > clear what you're doing.  Basically, specs that rely mostly
 > on attributes that might get attached to other people's
 > elements (e.g. xlink) are pretty well forced to prefix, 
 > otherwise it's just fine not to, but specs do need to be
 > clear on this point. -Tim

RDF Model and Syntax, unfortunately, isn't at all clear on this point.
It's probably best always to prefix rdf:about, rdf:resource, rdf:ID,
etc., just to be safe, though the spec does have examples like

  <rdf:Description about="...">
   ...
  </rdf:Description>

implying that 'about' and friends can optionally be unprefixed when
the element name is in the RDF Namespace.


All the best,


David

-- 
David Megginson                 david@megginson.com
           http://www.megginson.com/