Courier On Saturday, Aug 2, 2003, at 12:24 Europe/Berlin, Svgdeveloper@aol.com wrote: It seems to me that, at a fundamental level, there is a problem with the Namespaces in XML 1.0 Recommendation and the Namespaces in XML 1.1 specification. There is no mechanism defined to allow for change of any type in the names (or their implied characteristics) in a namespace. while such a mechanism would be useful, there is no reason to require that it be an inherent part of xml namespace specifications. the Namespaces in XML recommendations specify which element in the value domain (NCName x IRI) is denoted by a given lexical expression of the form <:< (more or less). This has nothing to do with what the interpretation which some other specification or an application applies to the name. the perception, that there is a problem, arises only if one confuses the identity of a name with its interpretation. every interpretation depends on a mechanism. if that mechanism, by its nature, imposes a "context" on an interpretation for its internal symbols, then it can effect a 1-1 map between universal names and internal symbols and must simply ensure that each interpretation happen in the correct context. if, on the other hand, the mechanism interprets all internal symbols globally, then it must establish contexts for interpreting the universal names and ensure that universal names map to the symbols which are associated with the specified interpretation. in order to ease the implementation, one could standardize descriptions for relations among the sets of names [see eg. http://lists.xml.org/archives/xml-dev/200105/msg00112.html] none of this is "a problem". either of the above approaches will work. the serialization facilities in cl-http, for example [http://www.ai.mit.edu/projects/iiip/doc/cl-http/home-page.html], should be an adequate demonstration of how one can use packages to do this in a single binding context. [see http://lists.xml.org/archives/xml-dev/200008/msg00626.html for a description of the general approach] in no case is this a matter which an xml namespace standard must address. ...