Re: Update on namespaces

"James Clark" <jjc@jclark.com> wrote, in response to me:
>> Stylesheet stuff based on namespaces would require more machinery that
>does
>> not currently exist, while the attribute approach is already supported by
>> all plausible stylesheet languages. Certainly by DSSSL, which is the
>> "official" XML candidate.
>
>I don't see this.  Why can't I just have
>
>(element mynamespace:para
>   (make paragraph))
>
>as now?
>
>James

Of course, you can have that, but it doesn't seem that namespaces are
carrying much weight in that case.

As I understand the proposals, there should be a stylesheet associated with
each namespace, and the namespace is supposed to help me find the right
stylesheet to look for the base name. In other words, it should be possible
to have a stylesheet not containing colons in it and use it with GIs that
contain colons.

If we don't have any such special machinery, then I don't see that we even
need a new delimiter, since we are gaining nothing new, since I still have
to make a custom stylesheet (+ DTD) when I import a namespace -- and
further, that stylesheet may have different mappings for a namespace+GI
pair, depending on what namespace is the base. And I could do this just as
effectively with a convention for using the delimiters that we have, like
"." or "-" (or even "/" if we add it to allow MIME-types as valid notation
names).

    -- David

Part of this comes down to the fact that we have only one explicit
requirement so far, which is associating semantics of a "Tagset" (not even
DTD) with some other tags in an instance. Namespaces are being pushed as a
solution, but I think each person has different ideas in mind for the
"reasonable follow on work" ince a proposal is in place. Paul Grosso
certainly seemed to be implying the kind of stylesheet mechanisms that I
was talking about in his last posting.

_________________________________________
David Durand              dgd@cs.bu.edu  \  david@dynamicDiagrams.com
Boston University Computer Science        \  Sr. Analyst
http://www.cs.bu.edu/students/grads/dgd/   \  Dynamic Diagrams
--------------------------------------------\  http://dynamicDiagrams.com/
MAPA: mapping for the WWW                    \__________________________

Received on Thursday, 19 June 1997 11:57:20 UTC