[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] More namespaces perversion
David Brownell wrote: >In summary: all namespaces (ever) do is provide a layer of indirection. >Their meanings change over at least time. When you use namespaces you >need to consider what that change will do to your applications. It seems to me that the current NameSpaces draft adds TWO things to XML. 1. A layer of indirection is added. 2. A mechanism to associate XML elements with URI's is added. It seems to me that not much attention has been paid to the things that can usefully be done with that second function. After all, there is no role specified for the Namespace URI. But consider how different tools might make use of the Namespace URI. If I were adding Namespace support to a structured editor, I'd present the Namespace URI as a hyperlink button in my user interface - it's trivial to do, can't hurt anything. Now if I'm designing an XML DTD for use with that structured editor, it's suddenly possible to use the Namespace URI's as a documentation mechanism. I can get rid of all those unreadable comments in my DTD, and I document the dtd using web pages attached to each element via the default namespace attribute. This is particularly true in the latest draft, which allows a DTD author to specify default namespace URI's on an element-by-element basis simply by adding fixed xmlns attributes (no prefixing required!) I'm not saying this is necessarily a good thing to do, although it might be. (There are a bunch of advantages to separating the documentation from the DTD.) I'm just pointing out something that could result from widespread adoption of the current proposal. Eric Eric Hellman Openly Informatics, Inc. http://www.openly.com/ Tools for 21st Century Scholarly Publishing xml-dev: A list for W3C XML Developers. To post, mailto:xml-dev@i... Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/xml-dev/ To (un)subscribe, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; (un)subscribe xml-dev To subscribe to the digests, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; subscribe xml-dev-digest List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa@i...)
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