Re: inclusion

The usual reading of "base URI" is that it's the base URI of the entity,
not of whatever references the entity.

On the other hand, the namespace spec was not completely clear on the
question of what happens when a parsed entity reference/xinclude/whatever
brings in an entity which has prefixes that aren't defined in that entity
and hence isn't "namespace-well-formed". Should it be an error? Should it
attempt to bind to namespaces active at the point of inclusion?

DOM Level 2 asserts the latter. Since it currently treats names as strings,
this does mean that explicitly absolutizing the namespace name in this
situation will yield a different URI within the
entity-with-undefined-prefix than it would in the document which references
it. That agrees with the behavior obtained if the same namespace
declaration had been explicitly asserted within the included entity.

______________________________________
Joe Kesselman  / IBM Research