Re: Context and... Re: the case of two bats

At 10:07 PM 2000-06-14 -0400, Paul W. Abrahams wrote:
>
>The namespace spec uses matching for only one purpose: kicking out
>documents as invalid.  Once you've decided a document is valid, the
>namespace spec has nothing more to say about matching.  

Would that it were so.  Consider the last two paragraphs in the following
quote from the Recommendation.  The authors clearly intended that the
namespace name, by which they meant the literal value of the ns-attr, was
the basis for matching markup vocabularies and their proper processors. 

Al

-- quote

1. Motivation and Summary

   We envision applications of Extensible Markup Language (XML) where a
   single XML document may contain elements and attributes (here referred
   to as a "markup vocabulary") that are defined for and used by multiple
   software modules. One motivation for this is modularity; if such a
   markup vocabulary exists which is well-understood and for which there
   is useful software available, it is better to re-use this markup
   rather than re-invent it.

   Such documents, containing multiple markup vocabularies, pose problems
   of recognition and collision. Software modules need to be able to
   recognize the tags and attributes which they are designed to process,
   even in the face of "collisions" occurring when markup intended for
   some other software package uses the same element type or attribute
   name.

   These considerations require that document constructs should have
   universal names, whose scope extends beyond their containing document.
   This specification describes a mechanism, XML namespaces, which
   accomplishes this.

Received on Wednesday, 14 June 2000 23:11:36 UTC