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At 2:46 PM -0400 8/21/02, Mike Champion wrote: >8/21/2002 1:16:12 PM, Paul Prescod <paul@p...> wrote: > > >>Namespaces should never have been scoped. That's a big part of what >>drove the implementation complexity up to such a large degree. > >Maybe I'm too busy thrashing in the seaweed to get my head above water, >but what would a namespaces spec without scoping look like? Every >element has to explicitly specify its namespace? Unprefixed element/attribute >names are in "no namespace" whatever that means? > It probably looks like what was used in an earlier draft of the Namespaces spec, where all declaration were made with processing instructions in the prolog: Namespace declarations must be located in the prolog of an XML document, after the XML Declaration (if any) and before the DTD (if any). This effectively makes the scope of namespace prefixes global to the whole document, including the DTD. It also means that should a processor wish to insert its own qualified names, it need only read the namespace declarations from the prolog to be sure of generating a new, unique, namespace prefix. <http://www.w3.org/TR/1998/WD-xml-names-19980518> I suspect an irrational aversion to processing instructions killed this sensible scheme. This would not have fixed the issues with unresolvable URLs or attributes in no namespace, but it would have neatly eliminated all scoping issues. -- +-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+ | Elliotte Rusty Harold | elharo@m... | Writer/Programmer | +-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+ | XML in a Nutshell, 2nd Edition (O'Reilly, 2002) | | http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/xian2/ | | http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN%3D0596002920/cafeaulaitA/ | +----------------------------------+---------------------------------+ | Read Cafe au Lait for Java News: http://www.cafeaulait.org/ | | Read Cafe con Leche for XML News: http://www.cafeconleche.org/ | +----------------------------------+---------------------------------+
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