Re: Namespace dispatching

 Paul, the TAG,
 I'd like to voice my support for this view. I don't see what do 
processors gain from the XSLT shortcut. I can see what people 
gain, but then is anybody left who thinks XML is/should be 
readily human readable? 8-)
 And the xslt:literal wrapper proposed by Paul disturbs 
readability very little, while adding dispatchability, so to 
speak. 8-)
 Best regards,

                   Jacek Kopecky

                   Senior Architect, Systinet (formerly Idoox)
                   http://www.systinet.com/



On Tue, 19 Feb 2002, Paul Prescod wrote:

 > I think I understand from the IRC logs that the idea is that the world
 > of XML documents will be divided into two sets, those where the
 > top-level namespace allows dispatching and those where it does not. The
 > latter documents must not be shipped with a +xml suffix. 
 > 
 > I am uncomfortable with the idea that these XML documents will not be
 > self-describing. Whereas one can almost always detect the Unicode
 > encoding, and can almost always detect the top-level namespace, one
 > cannot reliably know how to dispatch without metadata. Top-down
 > self-descriptiveness is one of the major advantages of XML and I think
 > that doing otherwise should be deprecated.
 > 
 > In my experience, this ability to have a top-level namespace be other
 > than the controlling one is at best a syntactic shortcut. No expressive
 > ability would be lost by inventing a wrapper element that did nothing
 > more than say: "I'm using XSLT and the thing inside me is a literal
 > result element". i.e.
 > 
 > <xslt:literal>
 >  <html>
 >  </html>
 > </xslt:literal>
 > 
 > I propose that the namespaces spec be updated to respect this new view
 > of the "meaning" of the top-level namespace and that future versions of
 > W3C specs like XSLT be aligned to conform. If it helps, we could call
 > this a new issue: 
 > 
 > "Which of the following are appropriate triggers for determining the
 > document type of an XML document when metadata is unavailable:
 > 
 >  1 DOCTYPE statement
 >  2 top-level namespace
 >  3 schema reference declaration
 >  4 other root-level declared namespaces
 >  5 any attribute on the root element
 >  6 anything in the document"
 > 
 > I have not seen a compelling use-case for anything other than 1 and 2.
 > Most of the others are just typing conveniences, IMO.
 > 
 >  Paul Prescod
 >

Received on Wednesday, 20 February 2002 15:05:18 UTC