- From: Andrew Layman <andrewl@microsoft.com>
- Date: Mon, 26 May 1997 14:47:11 -0700
- To: Paul Grosso <paul@arbortext.com>, w3c-sgml-wg@w3.org
Paul Grosso asks whether it makes sense to have the namespace of an attribute be anything other than the namespace of its containing element? Our example is: <BOOK> <TITLE>Philosophy: Who Needs It</TITLE> <PRICE banks:CURRENCY="USD">6.95</PRICE> </BOOK> Does it make sense to have a CURRENCY attribute that is defined in a namespace that is not PRICE? Absolutely. Having a single meaning and representation of currency used across a wide range of applications is valuable. Documents, and database records, and e-commerce transactions and a variety of other applications could then all have a common representation of CURRENCY, drawn from a single namespace. Consider the reverse, if every bookstore chain had its own representation of what a currency was and how to encode it. (Which reminds me of a bibical legend.) It would not always be used to qualify a price. In a foreign-exchange transaction, it would identify the units of a contract. In the financial section of a newspaper, it would appear qualifying the exchange rates. In fact, to the extent that attributes are used for "meta-data," it will be common to have attributes and elements come from entirely different namespaces.
Received on Monday, 26 May 1997 17:47:15 UTC