Re: [xml-dev] To namespace or not to Namespace ....

[Kendall Shaw <kshaw@kendallshaw.com>]

On Thu, 2010-04-08 at 20:07 -0400, Liam R E Quin wrote:
> The price you pay, though, is high. It's as if, once you used the Math
> namespace in Java, you could no longer write arithmetic expressions with
>     a = b + c;
> but now had to use
>     math.assign(a, math.sum(math.numericvalue(b), math.numericvalue(c));

Well, it seems very likely that I'm missing your point. There is
something like the default namespace syntax in XML and java.

> You can't write, for example, /html/head/meta[@name eq 'link'] but,
> instead, /h:html/h:head/h:meta[@name eq 'link'], and you have to
> understand why (and when) it's @name and not @h:name. So this isn't
> anything to do with processing XML as text.

The expectation that you could use /html insead of /h:html in XPath,
could be because someone is thinking of an XML text file, where they see
"<html". Or, that has usually been the confusion I've seen people having
about that.

If I'm writing an XPath expression to address an element that is named
"floop" in the "http://www.example.com namespace", I would look for the
syntax required to do that.

Are attributes more trouble than they seem, because Technology X has
some syntax for addressing them that I didn't learn?