RE: xml:space, xml:lang, and namespaces

At 10:15 AM 6/1/99 -0700, Andrew Layman wrote:
>Makoto wrote: "I think that (1) the prefix xml is always implicitly declared
>and cannot 
>be redeclared and (2) the URI 'http://www.w3.org/XML/1998/namespace' 
>must not be attached to any prefix."
>
>That is also my memory from the discussions in the namespaces spec design.
>It is unfortunately not spelled out in the spec precisely, but we had some
>debate over whether other prefixes could be attached to
>'http://www.w3.org/XML/1998/namespace', whether parsers were required to
>match any prefix attached to 'http://www.w3.org/XML/1998/namespace', etc.
>and the answer was "no."

Almost.  Yes, we had that discussion.  Yes, the premise is reasonable.
Unfortunately, we failed to reach consensus that it was a good idea
to write that into the spec; thus, per the spec, it is perfectly 
legal to say

<z xmlns:evil="http://www.w3.org/XML/1998/namespace">

Furthermore, any reasonable implementation of a namespace-aware
API and application would probably handle <foo evil:space="preserve">
in the expected way.  But the spec doesn't require it. -Tim