Re: Namespaces, W3C XML Schema (was Re: ANN: SAX FiltersforNamespaceProcessing)

[Francis Norton <francis@redrice.com>]

Elliotte Rusty Harold wrote:
>
>  I don't want to see any prohibition on local types enshrined as a best practice, or otherwise deprecated.
> 
I certainly proposed a best-practice prohibition on unqualified local
types (I may not have specified the "unqualified" bit, which was
sloppy).

I now feel I have a better understanding of the rationale for local
types in general and would phrase my current opinion in something like
these terms:

"Local types may be used to specify elements with the same name but
different types in different content models. Use of this feature makes
it simpler to write complex schemas which will be processed by
schema-specific processors. However it may also make it harder to
process the data with general purpose processors such as presentation or
editing tools.

By default the setting for xsd:elementFormDefault is "unqualified",
which means that local elements are distiguished from global elements by
the fact that they are not in the schema-specific namespace (if any).
Again this involves a trade-off - it may make it simpler to write a
schema-specific processor for these documents, but it may well cause
problems if elements from the schema are likely to be mixed in to
documents with elements from other schemas and then processed by
non-schema-specific utilities, especially if these utilities use XSLT or
XPath."

Does this sound reasonable?

Francis.