RE: [xml-dev] My proposal: Implicit namespaces

["Michael Kay" <mike@saxonica.com>]

> 
> we can simplify our lives by saying "namespaces in HTML are 
> only ever needed for non-standard customized fragments."
> 
> In other words, if you want to put in SVG into an HTML 
> document, there are not name clashes (in context) so there is 
> no purpose served by namespaces.
> All the HTML committee needs to do is say something like
> 
> "These are the standard vocabularies: HTML, SVG, RDF, etc 
> etc, if you find an element belonging to them, that starts a 
> new branch."
> 

Another way to achieve this goal is to allow the designer of an XML
vocabulary (=a set of namespaces) to define

(a) a list of predeclared namespace prefixes for that vocabulary

(b) a list of local names that are known to be in each of those namespaces

When invoking an XML parser, the user should be able to reference this
"vocabulary definition", and the XML parser should use it to resolve (a) any
undeclared namespace prefixes, and (b) any unprefixed local names. An "nnML
parser" is then an XML parser with built-in knowledge of the nnML vocabulary
definition.

For applications consuming the output of the XML parser, there would be no
change from the current infoset.

This is orthogonal to changes allowing the use of expanded QNames rather
than prefix-based QNames in element and attribute markup.

The third part of the requirement is dealing with "namespace prefixes in
content"

Regards,

Michael Kay
http://www.saxonica.com/
http://twitter.com/michaelhkay