Re: Fixed base

John Cowan wrote:

> > It also opens the way to a further simplification. An element with no
> > namespace name can be treated as having a namespace name of
> > "contextdependent:/".  This makes the behaviour of xmlns="" not be an
> > ugly special exception, but just a consequence on the normal rules on
> > resolving relative URIs.
> 
> Unfortunately, an empty URI reference is already a special case, meaning
> "this very document in which the URI reference appears".  So this
> "further simplification" won't work.

RFC 2396 section 4.2 has an escape hatch that allows the special-casing
not to be used in certain circumstances:

>    However, if the URI reference occurs in a context that is always
>    intended to result in a new request, as in the case of HTML's FORM
>    element, then an empty URI reference represents the base URI of the
>    current document and should be replaced by that URI when transformed
>    into a request.

In any case, the further simplification is probably too big a change to
make at this stage.  Too many standards have already entrenched the
concept of elements having an expanded name with a namespace URI that
may be null/missing.

James