Clarification of namespaces

Hi.

I'm doing research for a book on XML. After reading and rereading the W3C
Recommendation of Namespaces in XML (14Jan99), I found two areas that seem
to not be definitively addressed:

First, at the end of section 5.2, it explains how to make it so there is no
default namespace. It does not however, explain why you'd want to do such a
thing, or what that means for the elements involved.  In the Beers example,
at the very end of section 5.2, what namespace are those elements
(brandname, origin, details, etc.) considered to belong to? Or what does it
mean to not be part of a namespace? (Are they in some sort of namespace
void?) And is "non-defaultness" inherited...that is, do the elements class,
hop, pro, and con, that are found inside details (which has no default
namespace) also have no default namespace? What is the point of all that?

Second, there is very little information about how attributes are treated.
Are they considered to be part of the namespace that their enclosing
element is from? But then, at the end of the first paragraph in section 5.2
the specs state that "default namespaces do not apply directly to
attributes", so does that mean that if there is a default namespace for an
element, that the attribute has no namespace? Are attributes only
considered to be part of a namespace that is declared with a proxy? If that
is so, again I would ask, what does it mean to have no namespace?

Thanks for your assistance.

Liz

_______________
Liz Castro
Cookwood Press
mailto:lcastro@cookwood.com
http://www.cookwood.com/

Author of these Visual QuickStart Guides
published by Peachpit Press:

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(Also Netscape 2 and 3 for both Mac and Windows)

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Received on Thursday, 27 July 2000 10:50:42 UTC