Local Context [was: Why I moved from Forbid to Literal]

Paul Grosso wrote:

> I hear you, but suppose some Evil Generator Tool creates a document
> that does not comply to the "strict requirement" you want to put on it.
> Then what is my compliant consuming tool supposed to do?
>
> In my understanding, it is precisely the answer to that question that
> we are searching for.

This is, in fact, precisely the question before us. It seems to me that where
Simon and Henrik have advanced the solution is in their insistence on the
explicit recognition of a 'context' for the understanding of a namespace.
Recognition of that context is just as important for the markup consumer in
resolving the semantics of a namespace as it is for the document creator in
attempting to establish those semantics. Namespace resolution for the purpose
of XSLT document () function processing, as in David's example, is one such
very specific context. The rule requiring literal comparison in that situation
is well understood and should be preserved, despite the unfortunate outcome
which mismatched alphabetic case will yield in that particular context. The
point is that there are other interpretive contexts, other than a document
consumer executing an XSLT transformation. The elaboration of semantics from
namespace names in every such context must be ultimately under the control of
the document-consuming instance process, which will, after all, infer or
elaborate a great deal else of semantic import besides the particular
resolution of namespace names.

Respectfully,

Walter Perry

Received on Friday, 30 June 2000 17:10:59 UTC