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Re: Shouldn't colon be reserved?

• To: xml-dev@l...
• Subject: Re: Shouldn't colon be reserved?
• From: "G. Ken Holman" <gkholman@C...>
• Date: Mon, 09 Sep 2002 06:34:32 -0400
• In-reply-to: <20020909153453.12a38261.code_martial@s...>

At 2002-09-09 15:34 +0530, Tahir Hashmi wrote:
>What I was wondering is
>that all the characters that play a special role in PDATA, like single
>and double quotes, angle brackets and the ampersand are reserved
>characters.

They are not reserved, all that is provided are syntactic alternatives to 
expressing these characters for use when the explicit expression would 
otherwise be ambiguous.

For example, there is no way to put both a single quote and a double quote 
in an attribute value without resorting to an escaping method (either the 
built-in entity or a character references).

>Then why is it that colon, which is used to specify xmlns
>prefixes not reserved? Is it for the fear of breaking existing XML
>apps or for some other reason?

The introduction of XML Namespaces didn't change XML 1.0 ... nothing has 
changed XML 1.0 and new versions of XML will have their new versions such 
that XML 1.0 won't change.  The colon wasn't treated specially in XML 1.0 
and that won't change.

XML-based applications are either namespace-aware or not, as described in 
the namespaces Recommendation.

Layering is good.

I hope this helps.

................ Ken


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