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Greetings,
On Wed, 31 Jul 2002, Simon St.Laurent wrote:
> > <x:foo bar="bogus"/>
>
> The namespaces specification leaves the relationship anomalous by
> providing no clear answer about the association. While its non-answer
> and my proposal should work effectively the same in practice, that
> notion doesn't appear to go down well with people who are happier with
> specifications as written.
Are we reading the same spec? Section 5.2 says[1]
> A default namespace is considered to apply to the element where it
> is declared (if that element has no namespace prefix), and to all
> elements with no prefix within the content of that element. If the URI
> reference in a default namespace declaration is empty, then unprefixed
> elements in the scope of the declaration are not considered to be
> in any namespace. Note that default namespaces do not apply directly
> to attributes.
OK, it's in the legalese appropriate to specs, and a slightly subtle
point that you might not get the first time you read it (I didn't),
but just to avoid any doubt, there's an example promptly presented in
section 5.3 which is intended to drive the point home.
So it isn't quite headlined, and it may or may not be a design wart,
but there's no way you can say it's ambiguous or implicit.
I really, really, don't see the big deal about this, or the heat about
URIs. I appreciate the principle of least surprise, and can see where
both the namespace and URI specs permit behaviour which violates it
somewhat, and I can see that that can be problematic in some contexts.
So there's a best-practice issue; so what? If you design a system which
uses that slightly surprising behaviour, then you think twice to make
sure that there isn't a more natural alternative, but if you do in fact
need it, then that's that.
All the best,
Norman
[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/REC-xml-names-19990114/#defaulting
--
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Norman Gray http://www.astro.gla.ac.uk/users/norman/
Physics and Astronomy, University of Glasgow, UK norman@astro.gla.ac.uk
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