Re: Namespaces,

[Richard Tobin <richard@cogsci.ed.ac.uk>]

>Sorry, I was not clear. By "unqualified child elements" I mean
>unqualified child elements being interpreted as being in the namespace
>of their parent. XML Schemas did introduce this.

But that isn't what XML Schemas does.  Rather it allows a schema for
some namespace to include declarations for elements in no namespace,
provided they are contained within an element from the namespace.

That is, it provides an interpretation of elements in no namespace as
being *scoped by* their containing, namespaced element.  It doesn't
put them in the namespace, at least not literally.

But I'm sure you know all that.

>is not in scope, they're not in any namespace. My point is that XML
>Schemas did to namespace processing what DTDs did to attributes in
>document processing.

Do you mean that it's only because of DTDs that we can consider
attributes to be scoped by their elements?

>You get different results depending on whether a
>schema is present. I can't see this as a good thing.

What is the "different result" you get?  It doesn't change the
namespace of the elements.  It just does some work - what you might
call context-sensitive type assignment - that otherwise would have to
be done by the application.

Incidentally, this use of unqualified local elements is very natural
for some applications.  Consider structures in a traditional
programming language like C, and represent the fields of the structure
by subelements.  Do you expect to have to qualify the field names?
No, they are scoped by the type of structure containing them.

-- Richard