Re: What the namespace spec should say (was: Re: Irony heaped on irony)

"Paul W. Abrahams" wrote:

> I still feel it's essential to have
> some standardized way of associating metadata with namespaces.  But the
> discussion has shown there's another way to do that: create new attributes for
> that purpose.
>
> [Side note: the specification of such attributes could be tricky, because
> attributes are normally treated as a set, not a sequence.  The xmlns-metadata
> attribute would have to specify both the namespace prefix and the URI for the
> metadata (and maybe its intended interpretation also).   Ordinarily a single
> attribute specifies a single property.  This looks to me like a difficult
> problem but not an insoluble one.]

Postscript: Offloading the task of identifying metadata to some attribute other
than xmlns would make it crystal clear that the purpose of xmlns is to provide a
unique, meaning-free identifier, and nothing more than that.

Paul Abrahams

Received on Friday, 26 May 2000 12:38:26 UTC