Re: Namespaces,

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

[Oops, I mis-spelled the xml-dev address in the first copy of this.]

>I understand the use case, but I'm not convinced I like the solution,
>since the resulting data is non-portable. That is, if you remove an
>unqualified child element from its parent and transfer it to another
>file, you've lost the context and no longer know how to interpret the
>data. This is not the case with elements in namespaces.

This is quite true.

Simon points out (and I hadn't thought of it like this until he said
it) that Schemas could solve this problem in certain situations,
because the type assigned by the schema can be carried around in the
PSVI.  Unlike Simon, I don't think this constitutes a conspiracy to
force people to use XML Schemas.  In any case, preserving type
information through transformations is error-prone to say the least
(see discussions about XInclude).

>is there anything you can do with an attribute that you can't
>do with a PCDATA-only child element?)

I believe it was a deliberate decision in XML Schemas to try and make
simply-typed elements and attributes as similar as possible in this
respect.

-- Richard