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Namespaces blur (A multi-step approach on definingobject-orientednature

• To: xml-dev@l...
• Subject: Namespaces blur (A multi-step approach on definingobject-orientednature of DOM)
• From: Eric van der Vlist <vdv@d...>
• Date: 22 Aug 2002 08:35:37 +0200
• In-reply-to: <00e401c249a4$348571a0$32f5d90c@c1980223a>
• References: <8BD7226E07DDFF49AF5EF4030ACE0B7E06621F77@r...> <1029896844.25933.160.camel@marajen> <00e401c249a4$348571a0$32f5d90c@c1980223a>

On Thu, 2002-08-22 at 08:21, Jeff Rafter wrote:

> By usual defaults do you mean de facto defaults? The actual defaults are
> both unqualified. The actual defaults create documents that make little or
> no sense from what I have seen because, regardless of the "unqualified"
> setting, the root (because it is global) *must* be:
> 
> <n:name xmlns:n="http://www.example.com">
>   <first/>
>   <second/>
>   <last/>
> </n:name>

Yep and even though I am strongly against such designs, we must
acknowledge that, in practice, namespaces blur...

This is wanted per the namespaces rec for attributes: local
(unqualified) attributes do not have namespace URIs but are considered
to "belong" to the namespace of their parent element and such designs
make it true in a lesser degree for "local elements" (ie elements with
no namespaces) which "meaning" depends on the namespaces (or lack of
namespaces) or their ancestor elements.

If I update your example and consider the namespace
"http://www.example.com" as dark blue:

<n:name xmlns:n="http://www.example.com" local="" n:global>
  <first>
   <second>
    <last/>
   </second>
  </first>
</n:name> 

The "n:global" attribute is dark blue, the "local" attribute just
slighly lighter, and the "first", "second" and "last" elements are
lighter and lighter in a subtle gradient of blue...

The fact is that, independently of namespaces, the meaning of an item in
a tree depends on its position in the tree and namespaces kind of
exarcerbate this fact by their purpose to allow unexpected pieces to be
pasted into well defined vocabularies and also by the differentiation
made between "local" and "global" attributes...

Eric
-- 
Rendez-vous à Paris.
                          http://www.technoforum.fr/integ2002/index.html
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Eric van der Vlist       http://xmlfr.org            http://dyomedea.com
(W3C) XML Schema ISBN:0-596-00252-1 http://oreilly.com/catalog/xmlschema
------------------------------------------------------------------------

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