Re: treatment of ns prefixes by intermediaries

David Fallside wrote:

>This question came up during an implementer's interop test session: Is an
>intermediary obliged to preserve namespace prefixes? The spec says nothing
>explicitly (that we could find) but appears to implicitly oblige
>intermediaries to preserve them. What did the WG intend?
>
"preserve namespace prefixes" would seem to be essential for those 
blocks where the SOAP processing model has no good type knowledge of 
many / most attribute and element values that may appear inside and may 
be prefix qualified, so changing prefixes in many regions could be 
devastating, unless blocks were required to be namespace-self-contained.

A more precise question might be, is an intermediary obligated to 
preserve namespace declarations, which is a bigger question than just 
preserving the prefix, because you can preserve prefixes while 
reshuffling declarations (from children to a parent, for example).

There are also several different areas where the question should be asked:

1.  Declarations appearing on envelope structures.
2.  Declarations appearing in untouched blocks of a known encoding
3.  Declarations appearing in untouched blocks of an unknown encoding
4.  Rewritten blocks
5.  New blocks

You don't necessarily need to address each individually as long as you 
have considered each individually.

Namespace declarations are clearly part of the infoset, and since 
internal and external subsets are not allowed, they are all applied 
explicitly.

Ray Whitmer
rayw@netscape.com

Received on Friday, 7 February 2003 13:48:47 UTC