Re: xmlns

Frank Ellermann <frank.ellermann@t-online.de> wrote:

> > XHTML 1.0 Strict and Transitional share the same namespace
> > "http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml". Declaring a namespace doesn't
> > help for your purpose.
> 
> Tnx, this explains why 2 of my 3 experiments failed.  But the
> 3rd variant <dummy xmlns=""><base target="_top" /></dummy>
> failed too, and this was essentially a copy of an example in
> http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml-names/#defaulting (5.2, last part:
> <details xmlns=""> etc. </details> within an XHTML <table>).

If you declare a namespace like that, the 'base' element belongs
to no namespace because of namespace defaulting.  So even if a user
agent is smart enough to understand namespaces, that 'base' element
doesn't bear semantics of XHTML's 'base' element, so you won't be
able to achieve your objective.

> As long as the <details> resp. <dummy> section is well-formed,
> i.e. the validator finds the corresponding end tag etc., why
> not simply ignore this section ?   

Validity and well-formedness are two distinct things.  Your document
is well-formed but not valid.  Please check the definition of "valid" [1]
and "well-formed" [2] in the XML spec.

As I said, since features you want to add all belong to the XHTML
namespace, namespaces are not relevant in this case.  A simple
solution would be to just use XHTML 1.0 Transitional, or if you
are using a DTD-aware authoring tool and you want to avoid other
"transitional" features creeping into your documents, you might
want to write a custom DTD for your internal use and publish your
documents as XHTML 1.0 Transitional.

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml#dt-valid
[2] http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml#sec-terminology

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

Received on Sunday, 27 January 2002 23:28:32 UTC