Re: Namespaces and other stuff

[Tim Bray <tbray@textuality.com>]

At 06:41 PM 14/05/01 +0200, Guillermo J. HOYOS RIVERA wrote:
>                In an example XML page I found a reference like the next:
>
><article xmlns="http://www.xml.com/namespaces/first-x" 
>xmlns:html="any-old-bollocks">

Sigh.  I wrote that, and since it's (partially, and 
deliberately) wrong, I should explain.

First, this declaration says that any element which doesn't
have a prefix is in the namespace whose name is the string

  http://www.xml.com/namespaces/first-x

Second, it says that any element or attribute that has the
prefix "html:" is in the namespace whose name is the string

  any-old-bollocks

Since, in the rest of the example, the "html:" prefix is 
applied to elements like <html:h1> and <html:a> which are 
from HTML, this suggests that the above is a reasonable
namespace name for HTML.  This is wrong.  The question of 
what a good namespace name for HTML is, in the general case,
is a tricky one: see 

 http://www.rddl.org/natures/

The reason why the example uses this silly namespace name
is to demonstrate a bug in Internet Explorer 5.0's XML 
support (I have no idea if it's still there) where the 
software treated elements as html based on the "html:"
prefix rather than the actual namespace in use.  -Tim