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   RE: [xml-dev] namespace reprise

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> From: Emmanuil Batsis (Manos) [mailto:mbatsis@humanmarkup.org]
> Sent: Wednesday, August 21, 2002 3:19 AM
> To: Dare Obasanjo; xml-dev@lists.xml.org
> Subject: Re: [xml-dev] namespace reprise
>
>
> Dare Obasanjo wrote:
>
> >I'd be more interested in someone who can point out the the difficulty
> >caused by namespaces in XML that don't boil down to philosophical or
> >aesthetic arguments.
> >
>
> Namespaces should point to schemas, being the actual vocabulary
> definition pointer. Even better, it should point to an an RDF document

The benefit being...?

> (after all, RDF is about metadata) or perhaps something like an RDDL
> doc, or whatever.
>
> Secondly, a namespace URI designed *not* to actually point to something,
> should not be a URL or any other type of URI that uses a scheme designed
> to be used for resource retreival.

What if I decide at a later pointer that my namespace URI now *should*
locate something?

> Attributes, the base of numerous debate around XML are also tortured by
> the XML names recommendation, meaning the default namespaces do not
> apply directly to attributes" part. I never managed to understand the
> reasoning behind this.
>
> Another thing that bothers me is the rough edges concerning APIs. Most
> APIs handle namespaces in a really stupid way. Even XPath in XSLT
> (which, IMHO is by far the best in it's anticipation of namespaces
> thanks to the according axis) is incapable of dynamically producing
> namespaces and one must know the default namespace to match the desired

Well, that's by design. The default namespace is just a syntactic
abbreviation so that you don't need to use prefixes in your *input*
document.

> nodes.. Also, if I'm not wrong, if there are no namespace declarations
> then XSLT anticipates the empty string as the default namespace (but one
> may correct me in this one). Surelly this is another rec but if

Not really. It there are no namespace declarations, the elements are in no
namespace. The "empty namespace name" again is just a syntactic hack for
namespace undeclarations -- there is no such thing as a namespace named "".

> namespaces are not implemented consistently and effisiently in other
> applications then there must be something wrong with them ;-)
>
> ...

Julian





 

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