Re: null namespace Re: Next steps for the ARIA syntax discussion

Robert J Burns wrote:
> ...
> On May 22, 2008, at 7:41 AM, Julian Reschke wrote:
> 
>> For the record: I don't think there's any agreement in the XML 
>> community that there is something wrong with respect to what namespace 
>> non-prefixed attributes live in.
>>
>> It was one of several possible choices, and I haven't seen any 
>> evidence it's harmful. People learn how it works and that's it.
>>
>> Introducing something that looks similar but behaves differently 
>> probably would make things worse, not better.
> 
> Could you give an example of how it would make things worse?

If the identical syntax in HTML and XHTML creates different DOMs or 
infosets, that *is* a problem, isn't it?

> Julian Reschke wrote:
>> How is it a "major headache"? And how exactly would it help authors if 
>> the behavior would differ in different serializations?
> 
> Again, the problem arises where elements exist both on elements from 

I assume you mean attributes?

> foreign vocabularies and on elements from their own vocabulary. In this 
> case authors of compound documents end up with attributes from the same 
> vocabulary in two different namespaces. This may seem like a minor 
> issue, except I can't imagine why anyone would want that to happen or 
> what could possibly be gained by having a null namespace in a compound 
> document?

Well, it's not the authors but the processors of these documents that 
have to deal with it.

I work with XML a lot, and the only case where I've seen this in 
practice is the XSLT version attribute. Maybe I'm missing many 
vocabularies where the same attribute is used on elements of the same 
voculary *and* elsewhere. Do you have more examples?

> ...

BR, Julian

Received on Thursday, 22 May 2008 10:56:18 UTC