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Re: the infoset is two infosets (or even three?) [was:

• To: AndrewWatt2000@a...
• Subject: Re: the infoset is two infosets (or even three?) [was:
• From: amyzing@t... (Amelia A Lewis)
• Date: Tue, 20 Aug 2002 10:58:50 -0400
• Cc: xml-dev@l...
• In-reply-to: <1a4.713d801.2a9396f0@a...>
• References: <1a4.713d801.2a9396f0@a...>
• User-agent: Mutt/1.4i

On Tue, Aug 20, 2002 at 08:58:24AM -0400, AndrewWatt2000@a... wrote:
>In a message dated 20/08/2002 13:43:45 GMT Daylight Time, 
>amyzing@t... writes:
>> In order to do so, one of the things that we repeat, ad
>> nauseam, is that namespace declarations are not attributes.  
>
>I hesitate to comment on this having twice had my knuckles rapped this week - 
>by Tim Bray and Norman Walsh - for believing what a W3C Rec states... :) ... 
>but the Namespace in XML Recommendation seems to say the opposite to what you 
>"repeat, ad nauseam":
>
><quote_from_Chapter2>
>A namespace is declared using a family of reserved attributes. Such an 
>attribute's name must either be xmlns or have xmlns: as a prefix. 
></quote_from_Chapter2>

Quite true.  According to the Namespaces rec, namespaces are just
attributes.

>It seems to me that namespace declarations are attributes.

Not according to the infoset, although it depends upon how you define
things.  The official terminology, as John Cowan reminded me, is "namespace
attribute."  This happens to be one of those things that is utterly
impossible to explain to someone whose program is broken and thus needs to
understand the distinction between namespace decls and attributes.  A
namespace is an attribute that isn't treated as an attribute and isn't
accessible as an attribute unless you're using DOM ....  Bleah.  A namespace
declaration is not an attribute (that is, it is not accessible via the
"attributes" property of element information items in the infoset).

Amy!
-- 
Amelia A. Lewis       amyzing@t...      alicorn@m...
Confidence: a feeling peculiar to the stage just before full
comprehension of the problem.

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