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Namespaces: prefixes vs. no prefixes

• From: rbourret@d... (Ron Bourret)
• To: xml-dev@i...
• Date: Tue, 28 Jul 1998 20:06:52 +0200

This is undoubtedly a no-brainer, but it has just now occurred to me that the 
following two DTDs are almost certainly not the same.

<!ELEMENT A (B+)>
<!ELEMENT B (#PCDATA)>

and

<!ELEMENT FOO:A (FOO:B+)>
<!ELEMENT FOO:B (#PCDATA)>

Originally, I had thought that instances of the first case would be recognized 
by applications designed for the second -- that is, an application would have a 
"default" namespace) -- but now I am leaning the other way.  The namespace spec 
does not describe how to compare names, so I am assuming that they are first 
resolved into fully qualified names and then compared stringwise.

One of the consequences of this is that if namespace prefixes are used in a DTD, 
they must be used in both the instance file and in the application.  (Of course, 
it is easy to imagine an application implementing a default namespace for 
backward compatibility, but this is outside the spec.)

Could somebody confirm that these DTD are, in fact, different?

-- Ron Bourret

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