RE: SD5 - Namespaces - New Version 2

Paul Grosso asks whether it makes sense to have the namespace of an
attribute be anything other than the namespace of its containing
element? Our example is:

<BOOK>
	<TITLE>Philosophy: Who Needs It</TITLE>
	<PRICE banks:CURRENCY="USD">6.95</PRICE>	
</BOOK>

Does it make sense to have a CURRENCY attribute that is defined in a
namespace that is not PRICE?  Absolutely. Having a single meaning and
representation of currency used across a wide range of applications is
valuable. Documents, and database records, and e-commerce transactions
and a variety of other applications could then all have a common
representation of CURRENCY, drawn from a single namespace. Consider the
reverse, if every bookstore chain had its own representation of what a
currency was and how to encode it. (Which reminds me of a bibical
legend.)

It would not always be used to qualify a price. In a foreign-exchange
transaction, it would identify the units of a contract. In the financial
section of a newspaper, it would appear qualifying the exchange rates.

In fact, to the extent that attributes are used for "meta-data," it will
be common to have attributes and elements come from entirely different
namespaces.