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

["Pete Cordell" <petexmldev@codalogic.com>]

Original Message From: "Amelia A Lewis"
> On Tue, 21 Sep 2010 19:49:01 -0700, Ramkumar Menon wrote:
>> for e.g. [
>> <orderInfo xmlns:poid="1234" xmlns:description="sampleOrder"
>> xmlns:numberOfItems="3"/>
>>
>> How Lovely!
>> ]
>
> <snicker />
>
> Beautiful!  Not only abuse of namespace declarations (but perfectly
> legal, of course), but also abuse of the laxity of definition of URI
> within W3C.

I would say 'legal', but not 'perfectly legal'!  I think it's a case that if 
we were applying regular laws, lawyers could make a lot of money out of it!

The paragraph before what Roger quoted in XML 1st Ed 
(http://www.w3.org/TR/1998/REC-xml-19980210) says:

    A Name is a token beginning with a letter or one of a few punctuation
    characters, and continuing with letters, digits, hyphens, underscores,
    colons, or full stops, together known as name characters. Names
    beginning with the string "xml", or any string which would match
    (('X'|'x') ('M'|'m') ('L'|'l')), are reserved for standardization in 
this
    or future versions of this specification.

So assuming the above XML is legal, then all the xmlns:??? parts can ONLY be 
namespace declarations.

Thus the 3 in xmlns:numberOfItems="3" can, in 'legal' terms, only be a URI, 
and not an integer count that can be incremented / decremented etc.  You 
could of course argue that the 3 is actually a URI (and not a number) that 
just so happens to represent the integer value 3!

Pete Cordell
Codalogic Ltd
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