Re: belated namespace declaration attributes

At 23:13 26.11.2003, Per Bothner wrote:
>This is tricky to implement (and for humans to read),
>because the namespace declaration attribute follows
>an enclosed expression that makes use of it.  This
>means that namespace resolution cannot be done during
>the first parsing pass.
>
>XQuery could avoid this complexity, by requiring that
>namespace declaration attributes come before regular
>attributes - or at least before any enclosed expressions.

Hi Per,

Element constructors use the syntax of XML, which does not require 
namespace declaration attributes to occur before other attributes. If we 
made the change you suggest, suppose that a user wants to write a query by 
cutting existing XML text and pasting it into a query, adding dynamic 
content - this user would have to make sure that all namespace declaration 
attributes occur first, which means editing the text everywhere that this 
is not the case.

To me, this seems like an ease-of-use versus ease-of-implementation issue, 
and the implementation is not all that difficult.

Jonathan

This email message represents my views only, and is not a response from the 
W3C XML Query Working Group.

Received on Tuesday, 2 December 2003 13:56:28 UTC