RE: Wording of XPath relative namespace URI errata

> My question is: does anybody think the XPath wording should be changed
> to use a wording similar to [2]?

I know this is a hot potato and it would be much wiser to approach it with a
very long spoon, but my main reservation is: have we really seen the end of
the story? For example RFC2396 is adamant that uppercase and lowercase are
equivalent in the scheme name part of the URI, but XPath blithely ignores
this; similarly XPath ignores the equivalence between escaped and unescaped
representations of a URI.

So I wonder whether it would make sense in XPath to caveat the rules for
namespace URI comparison even more widely, saying only that the equivalence
between namespace URIs is as defined by the namespaces Recommendation, and
that the string value of a namespace node is some URI that is equivalent to
the one used in the namespace declaration. That places all the problems (and
their eventual solution) in the namespaces Rec, which is where they belong.

Mike Kay

Received on Tuesday, 12 September 2000 09:30:31 UTC