Re: foreign namespaces

"James Fuller" <james.fuller.2007@gmail.com> writes:

> Atom allows foreign namespaces everywhere ... I don't understand why
> xproc could not do the same thing ... I also note that this would
> remove p:pipeinfo, its good to reduce and remove from a spec.

Atom is a container format, not a processing language. There's no harm
in an element you don't understand or recognize in an atom feed.

Consider

  <p:identity/>
  <px:foo/>
  <p:identity/>

We could adopt a rule that says if px:foo doesn't have a declaration,
then it's ignored but that would prevent us from catching simple
errors (like typos or pipelines that fail to import a relevant
library). What's more, the pipeline might run perfectly fine but give
entirely incorrect results.

So I think we need a mechanism that allows the author to say "this is
data that I want in the pipeline, not a step". We could (and did try)
to do this with an "ignored-prefixes" attribute, much like
extension-prefixes in XSLT, but it was complicated and unweildy.

                                        Be seeing you,
                                          norm

-- 
Norman Walsh <ndw@nwalsh.com> | We cannot put off living until we are
http://nwalsh.com/            | ready. The most salient characteristic
                              | of life is its coerciveness: it is
                              | always urgent, 'here and now' without
                              | any possible postponement. Life is
                              | fired at us point blank.--José Ortega Y
                              | Gasset

Received on Wednesday, 27 August 2008 14:17:06 UTC