Re: "Binary XML" proposals

[Robin Berjon <robin@knowscape.com>]

At 19:41 10/04/2001 +0100, Al Snell wrote:
>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?

If you want to do general purpose binarization/compression, it could matter
for various reasons:

- round-trippability. People like using prefixes that mean something (to
them). It's easier to use xhtml:foo consistently than a1029:foo.
- xpath doesn't play well with namespaces in _some_ contexts. There are
cases when an xpath expression relies on a given prefix.
- a good number of DTDs use a fixed prefix
- XSLT would bother, notably when using exclude-element-prefixes as well as
when outputting XSLT.
- the xmlns and xml prefixes are special, and I think must appear as such
(the former's case depended on whether one looked at xml-namespaces or at
DOM2 last time I looked, but I hear that issue is to be resolved).

That's all I can think of off the top of my head. I'd say losing that
information is probably a bad idea.

_______________________________________________________________________
Robin Berjon <robin@knowscape.com> -- CTO
k n o w s c a p e : // venture knowledge agency www.knowscape.com
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