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Re: nested namespaces

• To: "Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@s...>
• Subject: Re: nested namespaces
• From: Bill de hÓra <bill.dehora@p...>
• Date: Mon, 16 Dec 2002 09:07:33 +0000
• Cc: xml-dev@l...
• Organization: Propylon
• References: <r01050400-1022-C95B36DE107B11D7B23F0003937A08C2@[192.168.124.21]>
• Reply-to: bill.dehora@p...
• User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.1) Gecko/20020826

Simon St.Laurent wrote:

> More generally, I'm wondering about cases where developers use container
> elements in one namespace which may be different from either the
> namespace of the parent element or the namespaces used by the child
> elements.
> 
> For example:
> <a:container 
>      xmlns:a="http://example.com/a"
>      xmlns:b="http://example.com/b"
>    >
>    <b:container>
>      <a:leaf />
>      <a:branch>
>        <a:leaf />
>      </a:branch>
>      <a:leaf />
>    </b:container>
> </a:container>
> 
> Some people seem to assume that elements in namespaces you don't
> understand can be discarded, but what gets discarded here?  

That's a difficult assumption to hold. Namespaces are purely for 
partitioning names - pedantically, that's not the same as a 
processing model for names. Thinking about it, discarding what you 
don't know is effectively a bug *unless* you've defined a protocol 
or a policy over and above namespaces for handling unknown sets of 
names. I haven't got to Marks' draft yet, but it seems like you're 
wanting to treat namespaces as a form of processing instruction or 
dispatch mechanism.

> Any thoughts?  I don't see any obvious answers here.

I doubt there are any. When you get down to it there's not much 
difference between unrecognized input and garbage input - other than 
perhaps it meant something to the origin producer.

Bill de hÓra

• References:
  • nested namespaces
    • From: "Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@s...>

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