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

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

> 
> Well, I might be totally wrong (and will then hopefully be 
> corrected), but to me, Michael Kay's suggestion seems to 
> envisage a namespace mechanism whereby it is possible to 
> determine the namespace regardless of the parent and the 
> scope because by virtue of having read the schema or the - 
> horribile dictu - DTD, it is statically known (I hope I don't 
> abuse this expression here) what element name belongs to 
> which namespace.
> 

Yes, that's what I had in mind.

I don't like mechanisms where the namespace depends on the context in which
an element appears. That seems likely to reintroduce many of the problems of
the current namespaces spec, where extracting a fragment of XML from the
middle of a document loses information that's needed to process it
correctly. Of course, my mechanism still has a context dependency (on the
"vocabulary definition"), but that's coarser grained and more likely to be
constant across an application, leading to a lower risk of data being moved
from one context into a different context that destroys its meaning.

Regards,

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