Subtle conformance problem for attributes in Modularization of XHTML

Rule 5 of section 3.1, XHTML Host Language Document Type Conformance, states:

    5. The DTD which defines the document type may define additional 
elements and attributes. However, these must be in their own XML 
namespace [XMLNAMES].

Rule 5 of section 3.2, 3.2. XHTML Integration Set Document Type 
Conformance, is essentially identical.

This unfairly groups all attributes together as needing to be in a 
namespace. This makes it impossible, for example, to integrate MathML 
or SVG with XHTML in a conformant way because they use unqualified 
attributes in no namespace.

This should be rewritten (as I suspect was the original intention) so 
that only attributes added to existing XHTML elements such as tr and 
div need to be qualified. However, it should be clear that attributes 
of elements from other namespaces do not need to be qualified. 
Language like the following might work:

The DTD which defines the document type may define additional 
elements and attributes. However, additional elements must be in 
their own XML namespace [XMLNAMES]. Furthermore, additional 
attributes of XHTML elements must also  be in their own XML namespace.
-- 

+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
| Elliotte Rusty Harold | elharo@metalab.unc.edu | Writer/Programmer |
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|          XML in a  Nutshell, 2nd Edition (O'Reilly, 2002)          |
|              http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/xian2/              |
|  http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN%3D0596002920/cafeaulaitA/  |
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Received on Sunday, 8 December 2002 16:24:24 UTC