what about XPath? was: Can everyone be happy?

<asbestos mode="on"/>

Tim,

I think the issue is that you and others have come up with the notion of
namespace == language (== maybe even schema). Many disagree with this and
there is no official W3C consensus on that. It is certainly not what the
namespace rec *says*, and I think people are rightfully annoyed when
official recommendations are changed in a non-backwards compatible way to
make namespaces do something that was not *officially* on the agenda when
the recommandation was written.

Actually I think it's time to start a new thread to plan how XPath can be
fixed. Something along the line of:

- deprecate namespace-uri(), define that it either returns the literal or
absolutized namespace name (this makes all known XPath implementations
compliant, while retaining compatibility with existing stylesheets),

- add two new XPath functions which are clearly defined to return the
literal / absolutized names.

- fix the namespace prefix matching -- of course this is the hardest part
because it will either break the existing recommendation or the existing
implementations.

Regards, Julian

Received on Thursday, 22 June 2000 09:30:22 UTC