Re: "Binary XML" proposals

[Al Snell <alaric@alaric-snell.com>]

On Tue, 10 Apr 2001, Joe English wrote:

> This starts to break down when you throw namespaces into the
> mix though, since element and attribute names are no longer
> simple, atomic values.  For example it's possible that
> 'foo:bar' and 'qux:bar' actually represent the same thing, and
> that an element in one part of the tree named 'foo:bar' may
> be _different_ than another element with the same name in
> a different part of the tree.

The way I'm thinking of it is as representing an element or attribute name
as a pair of pointers, one to the namespace URI and one to the element
name... that means two pointer comparisons for identity analysis (and note
that the string used is the URI rather than the prefix; using the prefix
instead of the full URI is just XML's way of doing the string-compressing
trick anyway, and we don't need a second layer of compression :-)

Correct me if I'm wrong - there is absolutely no semantic significance in
the choice of namespace prefix, right?

<foo:hello xmlns:foo="asdf" />

...identical to...

<bar:hello xmlns:bar="asdf" />

...my encoding will discard the prefixes foo and bar; will this in any way
ever matter, even slightly?

ABS

-- 
                               Alaric B. Snell
 http://www.alaric-snell.com/  http://RFC.net/  http://www.warhead.org.uk/
   Any sufficiently advanced technology can be emulated in software