Re: Namespaces aside, absolutizing is none of _X_Path's business

On Sun, 4 Jun 2000, Al Gilman wrote:
> At 05:50 PM 2000-06-03 -0400, Clark C. Evans wrote:
> >To clarify,  I am concerned about the XPath specification *redefinition* 
> >of the the namespace identity operation by specifically requiring that 
> >the nsattrib be absolutized before it checked byte-by-byte.  IMHO,
> >either the absolutization requirement should move from the XPath spec 
> >into the NS spec, or it should be removed from the XPath spec.  
> >
> >This example of *layering* is not consistent and coherent.
> >
> 
> - In automatically transforming the ns-attr to absolutized form, XPath is
> straying into InfoSet turf.  XPath should be walking, here, whatever graph
> is determined to be the InfoSet for the document.

While I'm on the soap box... 

I also feel that the "partition stuff" in the namespace spec 
should be axed.  Normative or not, it seems to be of little 
value and at best confusing.   

I see the role of an implementation of namespace spec as 
giving higher layers "interned QNames".   In other words, a 
handle that an implementation can use to compare names 
without doing string comparisons.  

It seems the whole purpose of the namespace partitions is
to add some sort of "contextual" information to namespaces.
IMHO, this is not needed.  If one wants to check the name
of an attribute's element, this is done at a higher level.
This is what XPath is for.

So, as XPath spec is intruding on NS spec, the NS spec is
also intruding on the XPath specificiation.  It would
be great to have this cleaned up as well.

Best,

Clark

P.S.  In fact, if a naming system implemented the partitions, 
giving a handle to unique QNames, then an XPath expression for 
a un-prefixed attributes would never match -- given the
XPath expression "\\@att", there is no way to find a QName
which represents this lone-attribute.

Received on Sunday, 4 June 2000 16:08:58 UTC