RE: "Binary XML" proposals

["Julian F. Reschke" <julian.reschke@gmx.de>]

> From: Al Snell [mailto:alaric@alaric-snell.com]
> Sent: Tuesday, April 10, 2001 8:42 PM
> To: Joe English
> Cc: xml-dev@lists.xml.org
> Subject: Re: "Binary XML" proposals
>
> 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 :-)

Why don't you combine both in one scalar value -- in almost all cases, you
want to compare tupel (namespacename, name) anyway.

> 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?

Wrong. Namespace prefixes might occur in attribute values and need to match
the prefixes in the context they appear in (take XSLT and XSD as example).