[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] RE: Reserved names and documentation
Borden, Jonathan writes: > If this is indeed the case, as it appears to be, then namespaces > have no real meaning outside of the xxx: prefix. namespaces become > nothing more (or less :-) than a standard naming mechanism for > tags. the namespace referenced urn is nothing more than an > arbitrary statement of who is supposed to own the "xxx:" namespace > prefix. Bingo! Or, to express it more generally, namespaces provide a convention for naming XML 1.0 elements and attributes in such a way that the names are globally-recognisable and globally-unique. This may seem like a small victory, but it enables me to do two things: 1. I can write code for handling a certain element type in *any* document, rather than just in documents of a specific type. If I know how to handle the element type http://www.w3.org/Profiles/voyager-strict a in HTML, then I know how to handle it in NITF as well. 2. I can allow other people to extend my document type without conflict, since their "name" element and my "name" element will be clearly distinguished. (Of course, I still need to establish handling rules: if I find an element type that I do not recognise, do I throw an error, skip the element and its descendants, or skip the element and process its descendants? In RDF, it's simple enough just to skip unknown properties, but in richer document types, that won't always work.) All the best, David -- David Megginson david@m... http://www.megginson.com/ 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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