Re: [xml-dev] My report on experiments with unused namespaces

["Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@simonstl.com>]

On 9/15/10 2:03 PM, Amelia A Lewis wrote:
> In short: I don't see the point.  A namespace declaration is merely a
> particular form of attribute use which defines a certain sort of
> information.  In the best of all possible worlds, a namespace would
> only be defined when it was needed to scope an element or attribute use
> ('scuse, I need to go cultivate my garden ...), but since multiple
> prominent uses of namespaces use the scoping mechanism for the
> *content* of attributes and elements, there is no way for a processor
> to know whether a namespace declaration is significant or not.

It's been a while, but I have heard of hacks which used namespace 
declarations as kind of a backchannel for propagating information 
through its scope.  The application had to know what it was looking for, 
and the 'extra' namespaces had a habit of getting pruned by other tools, 
but in a constrained context, it was fun.

Not the best of all possible worlds...

-- 
Simon St.Laurent
http://simonstl.com/