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Greetings,
On Thu, 1 Aug 2002, Joe English wrote:
> David Carlisle wrote:
> > in other words the phrase "global attribute" and "attribute in a
> > namespace" currently mean the same thing. which is why several people
> > have commented that unless you furher qualify something, a change that
> > puts unprefixed attributes into the namespace of their elements
> > will make them global attributes.
>
> That's entirely true. However, after re-re-reading [XMLNS]
> A.1 "The Insufficiency of the Traditional Namespace" and
> A.2 "XML Namespace Partitions" several times, I'm coming
> to the conclusion that this entire section is essentially
> meaningless. At most, it indicates a "Best Common Practice."
Hear, hear. Appendix A has _never_ made any sense, and appears as
nothing more than a hobby-horse that someone has managed to back into
the spec. It doesn't even indicate best-practice, since all it says
is that "`global attributes' are proctological ones (to use Joe's
term): they are commonly observed to occur in a variety of
applications".
There are no deductions you can make about the behaviour or semantics of
`global attributes' based on the text of this appendix. In particular,
I do not believe you can deduce (as David wants to do) that a `global
attribute' is valid on any element in the same namespace. The spec
says nothing about which attributes are valid where.
The term `global attribute' adds nothing, and thus the worry about
whether something is a `global attribute' or not appears not to
matter. An attribute is in a namespace or it isn't; if it is then
it's subject to generic namespace processing; if it's not, it isn't.
The only question that matters is:
What is the rule for determining the namespace of an attribute?
The spec's rule is an evasive one; Simon's edit does not affect the rule,
but consists of suggested behaviour for applications; the whole problem
would largely disappear if default namespaces disappeared. (is that
correct?)
All the best,
Norman
--
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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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