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

[David Carlisle <davidc@nag.co.uk>]

On 09/04/2010 19:50, Liam R E Quin wrote:
> On Fri, 2010-04-09 at 09:42 +0100, David Carlisle wrote:
>> On 09/04/2010 01:07, Liam R E Quin wrote:
>>> You can't write, for example, /html/head/meta[@name eq 'link'] but,
>>> instead, /h:html/h:head/h:meta[@name eq 'link'],
>>
>>
>> well actually you can since you've used eq you are presumably using
>> xpath2 so you can set the default element namespace to be xhtml
>
> You can in XSLT 2, but not in pure XPath, as it's done in the "host
> language", and not all host languages provide such mechanisms or
> make it easy to use them if they do.

bah humbug, you can't do  /h:html/h:head/h:meta in pure xpath either 
since you rely on a host language to bind the xhtml namepsace to the 
prefix h. The fact is that Xpath2 allows the host language to specify
the default namespace for elements in queries, and xquery chose to 
specify that was the same as the default namespace for element 
construction, which was a bad mistake.

>
> I admit I tend to write "eq" and then go back and fix it if
> XPath 1/XSLT 1 implementations complain :)
>
> Liam
>


David