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On Tuesday 29 January 2002 03:11 pm, you wrote:
> To my mind, alpha-renaming and XML namespaces are polar opposites.
> In the lambda-calculus, you can alpha-rename bound variables
> because the variable name is completely irrelevant; with XML
> namespaces, element and attribute names are deemed to be
> so important that they are made globally unique.
>
> The only similarity I can see is that both are used to
> avoid name clashes. Is this what you have in mind?
<?gtn action="don flameproof vest"?>
I used "alpha-renaming" precisely because I think the tag and
attribute names themselves to be irrelevant to the interpreter once
they have been used for "binding" to the processing logic. That's why
I think namespaces, while useful for some things, don't deserve
special status.
<?gtn action="remove flameproof vest"?>
In a looser sense, "avoiding name clashes" is OK too (kind of like
Emacs lisp, or JAVA package prefixes).
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