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RE: namespace handling models

• To: "'Bob Foster'" <bob@o...>,<xml-dev@l...>
• Subject: RE: namespace handling models
• From: "bryan" <bry@i...>
• Date: Mon, 5 Jan 2004 12:35:57 +0100
• Importance: Normal
• In-reply-to: <3FF8535C.5080404@o...>

>> am wondering if anyone can think of any
> > other models for how xml applications handle
> > namespaces that are not in the applications
> > known namespaces than these:
 >

>extract-text: a transform or filter is applied to the unknown elements 
>to extract text contents. Ex: RSS summaries. This is a subset of

>transform: elements and children in the unknown namespace are 
>transformed into known elements and text. Ex: Henry Thompson's normal
>forms.
Sort of a subset of the parse-tree model, if you consume known
namespaced subtrees of an unknown namespace you consume text nodes as
well. I think though that it is it's own model, specifying that what one
wants is just to bubble up text nodes can be very useful. 
Thanks for the mention of normal forms, hadn't seen it before, now I
have some reading for next weekend. However looking at what I googled up

http://www.ltg.ed.ac.uk/~ht/normalForms.html

 I couldn't see right off how one manages transform of unknown namespace
elements to known elements and text:

If I have <x:code xmlns:x="urn:whatever:namespace">90952</x:code>
somewhere in the xml coming into my application, and I have absolutely
no knowledge of the namespace and the element of local name code in it,
how does normal Forms or any technology help me to securely transform
that to <zip>90952</zip>. This is what I think you're saying it does,
and this is what I find strange and mystifying that it could do,
although I am willing to be astounded if it be so.

>In the spirit of your list, this doesn't include strategies by which 
>unknown namespaces become known, such as James Clark's NXML locate and 
>David Tolpin's Regular Associations, recently mentioned on this list.

Thanks for the info, still not sure if I understand the Regular
Associations post yet. Yeah, how an unknown namespace becomes known
isn't what I'm interested in right now. What I'm thinking about
specifically is models for how unknown namespaces are treated that
remain unknown all the way through an application, mainly because we
have an application in which I suppose that is going to be a big
problem. 

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