Namespaces WD comments

Dear Editors,

I am turning in my comments on the current namespaces draft.

Aki Yoshida
SAP
---
Comments on WD-xml-names-19980916.html

A 48-hour review process sounds like the last checkup step, and I 
understand lots of things have been discussed before, you compared many options 
to finally reach the current proposal. So, I don't know if it's right for me
to say something now. Nevertheless, I wrote down two points as my comments. 
I hope they are helpful. But If you think they are inappropriate, please forgive 
me.


(1)
---excerpts begin (Section 4)
"Element names and attribute types are also given as qualified names when they 
appear in declarations in the DTD:"
---excerpts end

This specification talks about validation using DTD in section 4, but does 
not go into details of how validation is done through DTDs that have 
hard-coded unbounded prefixes. I think, with the current assumption, there 
is no way to arbitrary mix two DTDs from different domains, which both happen 
to use prefix 'a'. Only way to solve this is to lexically scope prefix-binding 
for document instances (like what we have now) and also for each external 
DTD entity and for the internal DTD. Assigning a prefix to a URI within 
DTD, we can use the old PI form like <?xml:namespace xmlns:prefix="uri"?>, 
where binding-scope is lexical (i.e., the internal DTD, each of external DTDs 
must have its own prefix bindings declarations, and these bindings are not 
transferred to the  document instance). Is it bad to have such a mechanism?



(2)
----excerpts begin (Section 5)
For example, each of the bad start-tags is illegal in the following: 

<!-- http://www.w3.org is bound to n1 and n2 -->
<x xmlns:n1="http://www.w3.org" 
   xmlns:n2="http://www.w3.org" >
  <bad a="1"     a="2" />
  <bad n1:a="1"  n2:a="2" />
</x>

However, each of the following is legal: 

<!-- http://www.w3.org is bound to n2 and is the default -->
<x xmlns:n1="http://www.w3.org" 
   xmlns="http://www.w3.org" />
  <good a="1"     b="2" />
  <good a="1"     n1:a="2" />
</x>

----excerpts end
The first two bad's and the first good are obvious.
To clarify the fact that the second good element to be legal, it would be nice 
to have a reference to sections A.3. and A.4.
(we have:
 [second good element]
  <ExpAName name="a" eltype="good" elns="http://www.w3.org" />
  <ExpAName name="a" ns="http://www.w3.org" />

 so, the two attributes are distinct (i.e. from different partitions). 
 thus, legal. this is a good example showing namespace partition.)

---
That is all.
Best regards,

Aki Yoshida

Akitoshi Yoshida                       email: akitoshi.yoshida@sap-ag.de  
SAP, Business Framework Technology     phone: +49 6227 7 61234
P.O.Box 1461, D69185 Walldorf, Germany fax: +49 6227 7 71234

Received on Wednesday, 16 September 1998 08:41:35 UTC