Canonical XML and xmlns:xml

Dear XML Signature WG, John, Joseph,

I just wanted to peek those interested in "Canonical XML" implementations 
using Apache Xalan and Apache Xerces to some directions that I'm not aware 
of whether they make sense or not.

The "Namespaces in XML" rec [1] says:

<SNIP>
The prefix xml is by definition bound to the namespace name 
http://www.w3.org/XML/1998/namespace. The prefix xmlns is used only for 
namespace bindings and is not itself bound to any namespace name.
</SNIP>

This means that xmlns:xml="http://www.w3.org/XML/1998/namespace" does not 
have to be declared to be used. But this causes a problem for some XSLT 
folks so the Xalan developers decided to add the above xmlns:xml decl to 
the DOM tree and XPath results.

So during c14n, you "see" a namespace decl that is not specified 
(getSpecified() == false) in the XML input, not specified in the DTD but 
nevertheless occurs in the processing data.

At the moment, I don't know whether this makes sense or causes problems. Do 
you have some thoughts about that?

(For more on Xalan and XPath and Namespaces, see [2] and [3]).

Christian

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/REC-xml-names-19990114#nsc-NSDeclared
[2] http://nagoya.apache.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=2650
[3] http://nagoya.apache.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=4336

Received on Monday, 26 November 2001 13:13:26 UTC