Re: xmlns attributes...

Hi Shane,

On Apr 27, 2007, at 23:45 , Shane McCarron wrote:
> I had an action item from the XHTML Working Group and the RDF task  
> force to find some way to validate documents that declare  
> additional namespaces without resorting to the "internal subset  
> trick" that was enabled by XHTML Modularization.  I have submitted  
> a patch against version 0.8.0 of the validator, attaching it to the  
> relevant bug already in the issue tracking system [1].

Thanks a lot for looking into this. I wish the relation between XML  
DTDs and XML Namespace were a little less complicated, which would  
make this hacking of the validator unnecessary, but I am afraid this  
is a necessary evil :/

> This is not really complete - I think I need to understand if there  
> are contexts where this option should NOT be enabled.  Currently,  
> the patch just enables it all the time.

I modified your patch a little, enabling the filtering of xmlns:  
attributes only in XML mode (see [2]) but other than that it looks good.

Note that it does not make the validator entirely namespace-friendly,  
notably, it does NOT solve the question of validating documents with  
elements from a foreign namespace. Such a change would involve  
ignoring  all elements declaring to be from a namespace unknown to  
the document type, and their children.

> I look forward to comments on this potential change to the validator.

The patch is in CVS now [3], will be in next public beta of the  
validator.

[1] http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=800
[2] http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=800#c7
[3] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-validator-cvs/2007Apr/ 
0228.html

-- 
olivier