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Re: patterns vs. identifiers

• To: "Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@s...>,<xml-dev@l...>
• Subject: Re: patterns vs. identifiers
• From: "Jeff Rafter" <jeffrafter@d...>
• Date: Mon, 19 Aug 2002 11:07:44 -0500
• References: <r01050300-1015-8219B2A2B38B11D69F470003937A08C2@[192.168.124.21]>

Based on some of the recent discussions here I have been mulling over the
exact same thing. As you and others probably know I am a type guy as I came
to XML from programming not SGML... but I am being slowly swayed. For
example-- this was my thought process on namespaces and Pip the Golden
retriever:

The whole purpose of namespaces is this: to distinguish two similar
elements.

<rambling>

For example in FurnitureML a <table> is a peice of furniture but in XHTML it
is a set of tabular data. So the collision is that the names *look* exactly
the same. So for the golden retriever: he is not retrieving an actual object
(value) but a symbolic representation of that object (reference) -- the
question is on Type not on Name. So the symbolic naming is the problem.

<table> and <table> are the same-- it is their children or Type that is not.
The type of an element speaks to its actual real-world representation. This
can be expressed through the child pattern but won't always (for example
<div> in MathML and XHTML)

</rambling>

So if we eliminate the notion of reference (to a real world idea) and deal
only with pattern or value in the actual document is there some way to
eliminate namespaces entirely and still mix "vocabularies"?

Jeff Rafter
Defined Systems
http://www.defined.net
XML Development and Developer Web Hosting

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