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

[Michael Kay <mike@saxonica.com>]

> The next thing to sort out is what the W3C's definition of 
> 'deprecated' is. I would say it means that the above XML is legal for 
> a legacy piece of XML (appealing to Namespaces 1st Ed), but illegal 
> for an XML language defined after the publication of Namespaces 2nd Ed 
> (Aug 2006).
>

W3C doesn't make laws, it writes specifications. Don't read a W3C spec 
to discover whether document is legal or illegal. W3C specs typically 
define attributes or predicates such as "well-formed", "valid", 
"deprecated", and "namespace-well-formed", with rules for deciding 
whether a document satisfies this predicate or not. You can regard 
documents having these predicates as acceptable or unacceptable, if you 
like, but that's your choice.

Documents using names beginning "xml" are not illegal; they are not even 
ill-formed; they simply contain names that are reserved. It's up to you 
whether documents containing reserved names are acceptable in your 
application or not.

The status of documents using namespaces that are not valid RFC URIs (or 
IRIs in 1.1) is slightly more ambivalent. I believe the status of the 
document is that it is not namespace-well-formed; but a conformant 
processor is not required to report this fact.

Michael Kay
Saxonica