RE: ANN: SAX Filters for Namespace Processing

["David E. Cleary" <davec@progress.com>]

> > Isn't that one of the points of XML? The recipient can process the data
> > as they like.
>
> From my perspective, sure.
>
> From the perspective of "A SCHEMA IS A CONTRACT WHICH BINDS THE
> RECIPIENT TO INTERPRET DATA AS THE SENDER MEANT IT", perhaps not.
>
> People who get hung up on the "intent" of the message or talk about
> "invalidating" it seem to prefer the latter most of the time.

You are reading too much into it. My point is that if the creator of an XML
document uses unqualified elements for a reason, and the recipient of that
document willy nilly moves those elements into namespaces, there may be
serious side effects on processing that document properly. All this because
someone deems it "bad practice". Seems to do more to harm interoperability
than to help it.

It is easy to contrive examples that use unqualified elements for no reason.
And you may even find real examples where the author didn't know what he was
doing. But the fact is that I haven't really seen the use of unqualified
elements in real schemas, and my guess is that if I do, there most likely is
a real reason to do so.

Dave