Re: Verbosity of XHTML 2

Lachlan Cannon <luminosity@members.evolt.org> wrote:

> > We could provide a non-normative DTD, but if it's non-normative,
> > don't assume you can omit the namespace declarations from your
> > document.
> 
> Sorry, I didn't word that well. When I said default namespaces i meant 
> using xmlns:xlink for xlinks for example. Show people how it's done with 
> a certain namespace, and then they can do the same with a different one 
> if they want.

OK, got your point.  It's a bit ironic that only DTD can provide
default values for namespace declarations since it's so ignorant
of namespaces.

> By namespace defaulting here do you mean that I don't have to start 
> mathml or xhtml fragments with a namespace prefix in these documents? If 
> so that alone is very cool (from a saved bandwidth perspective anyway).

Yes, in some very limited cases such as XHTML and MathML, there
are no name clashes between the two vocalubaries and you could
rely on namespace defaulting and don't have to prefix them.
I would say this is rather special case, thanks to the Math WG's
effort to avoid name clashes with XHTML so that XHTML+MathML
could be used easily without using prefixes.

> I thought that whenever two different xml applications were combined 
> together namespaces *had* to be used?

There are several ways to use namespaces, and while DTD cannot
accommodate all the flexibility of namespace usage, within
certain constraint you may take advantage of defaulting.
Of course, with namespace-aware schema langauges you won't
have such restriction.

Regards,
-- 
Masayasu Ishikawa / mimasa@w3.org
W3C - World Wide Web Consortium

Received on Thursday, 15 August 2002 12:36:56 UTC