Re: I18n comment: prefix binding mechanism

* Felix Sasaki wrote:
>> At http://www.w3.org/International/reviews/0601-css3-selectors/

>> In 6.1.1, it should be made clear that the styling language (e.g. CSS)  
>> must provide a prefix binding mechanism. It is also unclear what effect,  
>> if any, namespace declarations in the document being styled have on  
>> prefixes used in the stylesheet.

>>> #6 "A type selector containing a namespace prefix that has
>>> not been previously
>>>      declared is an invalid selector. The mechanism for
>>> declaring a namespace
>>>      prefix is left up to the language implementing
>>> Selectors. In CSS, such a
>>>      mechanism is defined in the General Syntax module."

>again: do you depend on css or not?

Selectors can be successfully implemented and used without any mechanism
to bind a namespace name to a prefix. Selectors that depend on a prefix
cannot be successfully processed in this case, and the draft defines how
implementations must handle this error. It is not possible through black
box testing whether implementations support namespaced selectors or not,
since the behavior is the same if there are no prefix bindings. Any
technology that uses Selectors in some way would need to define a prefix
binding mechanism to allow authors to use prefixes in selectors.

It does not seem very useful to require any such technology to provide
this; the technology might be constrained e.g. to trees where elements
and attributes cannot be bound to a namespace, so any selector that uses
them would match nothing. The references as cited above are just
informative notes for people looking for more information. So no, there
is no dependency on the General Syntax module. Does this clarify the
situation?
-- 
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Received on Monday, 23 January 2006 16:12:26 UTC