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Namespaces in Content (was XML-aware programming language?)

• To: Richard Tobin <richard@i...>
• Subject: Namespaces in Content (was XML-aware programming language?)
• From: Jonathan Robie <jonathan.robie@d...>
• Date: Fri, 03 Dec 2004 10:17:35 -0500
• Cc: xml-dev@l...
• In-reply-to: <20041203124952.8D06A1B54F3@m...>
• References: <20041203124952.8D06A1B54F3@m...>
• User-agent: Mozilla Thunderbird 0.9 (Windows/20041103)

By definition, there are no namespaces in content, unless that content 
is of type xs:QName and validated by a W3C XML Schema processor.

In untyped documents, content is just a sequence of characters, as far 
as the XML parser is concerned. Any namespace interpretation given to 
that content is application semantics, not XML semantics.

We've dramatically increased the complexity of the XPath/XSLT/XQuery 
data model because we want to (1) be able to preserve namespace bindings 
in case they have application semantics that we are not aware of, even 
if the namespace bindings have no effect on the interpretation of the 
XML as a parser sees it, and (2) allow queries and stylesheets to do so 
without any advance knowledge of the namespace bindings that will need 
to be preserved.

These requirements do exist if you want to be able to query schemas and 
stylesheets without knowing what is in them. It would be very nice to 
wish them away...

Jonathan

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    • From: richard@i... (Richard Tobin)

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