RE: SAX Filters for Namespace Processing

[Tim Bray <tbray@textuality.com>]

Pardon the long excerpts:

At 10:21 AM 03/08/01 -0400, David E. Cleary wrote:
>> ><p:person xmlns:p="http://simonstl.com/person">
>> >  <givenName>Chip</givenName>
>> >  <familyName>Skillet</familyName>
>> ></p:person>
>> >Assuming you have encountered the above example, what was it that you
>> >couldn't do because of the unqualified nature?
>> 1. I couldn't write a simple filter that went and picked out
>>    the "city" tags from Simon's "person" namespace without
>>    keeping track of the stack.
>> 2. I can't drop this fragment into the middle of other XML
>>    without being potentially raped by their default namespace.
>But should XML Schema have been used as a hammer to subset well formed XML
>into what certain people feel is correct usage? You allowed this in
>Namespaces, and Schema had to model it.

XML Namespaces also provides an unambiguous way to
do the right thing in a clean and clear way:

<person xmlns="http://simonstl.com/person">
  <givenName>Chip</givenName>
  <familyName>Skillet</familyName> 
</person>

But, as has been repeatedly pointed out, whether or not the schema
WG went off the rails on this one, the sucker's been finalized
and blessed and shipped and we're stuck with it. -Tim