Re: ISSUE-41/ACTION-97 decentralized-extensibility

Maciej Stachowiak wrote:
> ...
> 3) A spec based on Microsoft's proposal could state changes to the 
> parsing algorithm, or just define a complete modified copy of the 
> parsing algorithm. After all, Namespaces in XML modifies XML parsing by 
> modifying the grammar of XML, even though that was never an official 
> extension point. I think changes to the HTML5 parsing algorithm are 
> necessary in some form to fully define Microsoft's proposal.
> ...

I think that's a bit misleading.

The parsing rules for "XML" aren't changed at all. What was a 
well-formed XML 1.0 document continues to do so.

XML Namespaces just introduces new constructs (expressed in 'old' 
syntax) and new constraints. So a given well-formed XML document may or 
may not also be a wellformed XML+XMLNS document.

In particular, you *can* use an non-namespace-aware XML parser to parse 
a document using XML namespaces. But, in that case, you have to extract 
the namespace information from the xmlns* attributes, and also have to 
check the additional constraints. Note that was a common strategy back 
when namespace support wasn't available yet.

BR, Julian