- From: Sam Hunting <sam_hunting@yahoo.com>
- Date: Sat, 3 Jun 2000 09:32:19 -0700 (PDT)
- To: abrahams@acm.org, "Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@simonstl.com>
- Cc: xml-uri@w3.org
[ paul abrahams writes:]
> Personally, I'd like to see namespaces rolled into the XML spec
> itself rather than existing in a separate document. Among other
> things, that would enable us to avoid the confusing definition of a
> Qname, which may or may not have a qualifier (a different example of
> something that quacks like a duck but isn't a duck). We could then
> just use "name", with perhaps a "historical note" explaining the
> previous use of the term Qname for those who hadn't heard the news.
This sounds like XML 2.0 to me (if anyting).
As I understand, the proposal is to replace the XML production:
[5] Name ::= (Letter | '_' | ':') (NameChar)*
with the Namespaces production:
[6] QName ::= (Prefix ':')? LocalPart
where:
[8] LocalPart ::= NCName
[4] NCName ::= (Letter | '_') (NCNameChar)*
Syntactically, this has the potential to break existing documents,
since XML 1.0 permits multiple colon characters, hence could be
characterized as morally problematic. (Of course, a careful reader of
the XML 1.0 spec would have avoided using namespaces in content
entirely, given that the recommendation states: <quote>authors should
not use the colon in XML names except as part of name-space
experiments</quote>, which mitigates the moral aspect.)
Semantically, I'm not sure that all authors of XML would wish to adopt
the Prefix/LocalPart dichotomy. Given our discussions so far...
S.
=====
<? "To imagine a language is to imagine a form of life."
-- Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations ?>
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Received on Saturday, 3 June 2000 12:32:50 UTC