[
Lists Home |
Date Index |
Thread Index
]
> Most namespace names, except
> in RDF applications are proper URIs.
what proportion of XML documents have you seen to enable you to make
such an assertion? I doubt anyone has seen more than half of all
naemspace conforming documents.
> But as you say, XML namespaces do work in practice. So there is no real
> problem.
But the misapprehension that some people have that the namespace and the
resource are inextricably linked leads to bad practice like the schema
rec (and schema implementations) dereferencing any namespace name they
happen to come across and assuming that what they find might possibly
be a schema for the document at hand.
> In any case
> when you use such a namespace name, you are clearly indicating to me that
> you do not indend to assign any semantics to this namespace. You certainly
> have that right.
depends what you mean by semantics. XSLT allows data to be embedded in
the stylesheet so long as the element wrapping that data is prefixed and
bound to a namespace not XSLT. I often use data:,x for that (actually I
often still use x as well, but don't tell anyone:-) Within the
stylesheet elements in that namespace contain important data used at
runtime. So the semantics are rather localised, just to this one
stylesheet, but they are specified in the XSLT rec which specifies the
semantics of any non xslt namespace when it us used as a child of the
xsl:stylesheet element.
> Really, the way I should have stated it to the initial question: Does the
> namespace equal the resource?
>
> What the resource _is_ depends on the intentions of the creator of the URI
> (reference). In many cases the URI reference is _intended_ to identify a
> namespace in which case the identified resource _is_ the namespace. In other
> cases the creator of the document intends to use the namespace simply as
> syntactic punctuation -- the "data" scheme seems quite acceptable for this.
> In the end it all depends on what the creator of the namespace intends.
>
A more succinct and more correct answer would be
In general, No.
You assume that namespaces are created; I think that is the fundamental
mistake. A namespace name is just a name like an element name.
If asking whether a given XML document is well formed, no one goes off
at a tangent discussing the relative merits of various element naming
conventions. The namespace name of an element in a document taht
conforms to the namespace rec is an entirely syntactic thing.
You can have a program just generating random strings.
It is reasonable to ask whether any of these strings is a well formed
XML document. (you may get lucky:-)
Of those that are well formed you can ask if they are namespace
conforming.
Of those that conform you can ask the namespace of the top level
element.
Getting the answer is just a mechanical operation. It might end up being
your email address or microsft's web page or anything else.
so any answer to the original question shouldn't contain irrelevant
details like intentions of (human) creators.
David
_____________________________________________________________________
This message has been checked for all known viruses by Star Internet
delivered through the MessageLabs Virus Scanning Service. For further
information visit http://www.star.net.uk/stats.asp or alternatively call
Star Internet for details on the Virus Scanning Service.
|
