Re: Consensus on alternate prefixing mechanism

On Fri, 2009-05-01 at 12:11 +0100, Martin McEvoy wrote:
> maybe try using the @prefix element in the same way @xmlns is used 
> then?..... eg:
> 
> <div prefix:foaf="http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/"
>      rel="foaf:page"
>      typeof="foaf:Document">
>     
> </div>

Problem with this is that any elements and attibutes containing colons
are assumed to be namespaced tokens by XML parsers - so the above will
be taken to mean "the 'foaf' attribute from the 'prefix' namespace" and
you'll get errors from parsers complaining that the 'prefix' namespace
is undefined.

Perhaps one of these:

 <div prefix.foaf="http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/">
 <div prefix-foaf="http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/">

However, both of these (and 'xmlns' is also guilty of this)
theoretically add an infinite number of attributes to the XHTML
namespace. This makes DTD-based validation impossible (or at least, very
impractical -- though the W3C validator has a workaround in that it
ignores all 'xmlns:'-prefixed attributes). Using a single 'prefix'
attribute solves this.

-- 
Toby Inkster <tai@g5n.co.uk>

Received on Friday, 1 May 2009 12:24:00 UTC