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   Re: [xml-dev] Namespaces alternative? (was Re:WD for Namespaces 1.1)

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1) Thanks for responding.  :)  I'd rather hear a disagreement than nothing
at all.

2) If everyone who is using namespaces appears to be happy with them, then
why is anyone even talking about it?  Why bother with Namespaces-1.1?

3) Why won't such a thing get traction?  Is it too much to swallow?  Is
everyone absolutely convinced that Namespaces are the only way to go?  Is it
because this wasn't brought up in a W3C WG or by someone who is even a
member of any of the authoritative groups?  In certain uses, XML is
equivalent to SGML, but I'd say that it's managed to get a fair amount of
traction...

4)  You are making several statements, but I don't know that they are
logically bound as you would have them be:

4a)Why would namespaces-within-schemas take on any more meaning than
namespaces-within-xml?  Internally, a QName would need to be normalized to
the namespace URI plus a NCName.  The difference in what I was saying is
that the normalized NCName would not necessarily be the same as the
LocalPart.  This practice is very similar to using a Prefix for the URI
alias, with the exception that I allow for the entire name to be an alias.

4b) .What is a "real" QName prefix?  If a system is namespace-aware and a
namespace has been given, then it must always resolve a name.  If your
meaning of "real" is that "xsd" always means "XML Schema Language" and that
"xsl" always means "XML Stylesheet Language", then there is absolutely no
point to declaring an xmlns in the first place; the prefix is the de facto
namespace identifier.  Since the idea of solely relying on the literal
prefix string to handle namespaces is "crazy talk", I am guessing that you
have a different meaning for "real".

4d) Can you give me an example of a document that has meaningful namespaces
in it  that makes any difference to a "well-formed only" system?
Well-formed systems act on documents regardless of namespacing issues right
now.  They assign no meaning whatsoever to the names, attributes, etc.  Just
because namespaces are tied to schemas does not invalidate the purpose of
well-formedness at all.  I agree XML cannot rely on well-formedness alone to
get anything meaningful done, but this has nothing to do with the
relationship between namespaces and schemas.

---
Seairth Jacobs
seairth@seairth.com


----- Original Message -----
From: "Bullard, Claude L (Len)" <clbullar@ingr.com>
> <!-- Those who are using namespaces appear to be happy with them.  -->
> <!-- Equivalent functionality won't get traction. -->
>
> Namespaces are the conundrum of XML theory.
>
> If namespaces are tied to schemas, they aren't just punctuation.
> If XML requires punctuation and schemas, well-formed only systems
> aren't XML.   A colonized name doesn't have to resolve to anything
> to be disambiguatible if the QName prefix is real.  If the namespace
> is just punctuation, it only needs the prefix.  If the namespace
> needs the schema, XML can't rely solely on well-formedness; so the
> theory of XML is busted.






 

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