[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] RE: Overloaded URIs (was Re: XLink: behavior must go!)
At 12:43 PM 06/13/1999 -0500, WorldNet wrote: >Okay, two or more documents interacting with one another >are determined to have exact element and or attribute names so the >namespace identifier then acts as a differentiator. What next? >Meaning, I thought namespaces were going to be like libraries >of contextual data definitions? It's understandable why someone might think so. But all a namespace is, in my understanding, is an abstract bucket in which can be placed all the "nouns" pertaining to a single XML universe of discourse. So if your documents never stray from a single such universe, they don't need namespaces. I think XSL is an interesting application in this case because the "nouns" it's intended to process will almost never be from the XSL universe itself. Some of XSL's own "nouns" (like apply-templates) are so distinctive in their own right that the likelihood of name clashes with the processed vocabularies, whatever they might be, is fairly small. Nonetheless, in the XML spirit of no-such-thing-as-a-reserved-word, an XSL processor expects you to declare that "in the context of this document [which just happens to be an XSL stylesheet], all XSL-specific nouns will be expressly associated with the XSL namespace." There's nothing magical about this. You could if you wanted associate the "xsl:" prefix with some *other* namespace. That would have to be almost calculatedly misleading on your part, though. :) >>The URI scheme has been >> suggested as a familiar way to accomplish this. I still haven't made up my >> own mind about it, but (to me) its chief flaw is that it *suggests* to a >> namespace-unaware human reader that There Is a "There" There. > >And I've become such an 'Accidental Tourist'. Anne Tyler, well, I'm not so sure I can force-fit her into an XML namespace discussion myself. But to return to the Gertrude Stein, er, namespace of "there is no there there," for a given XML document instance, a rose is not a sun:rose is not a midler:rose. That's all that namespaces are meant to keep sorted out. ========================================================== John E. Simpson | The secret of eternal youth simpson@p... | is arrested development. http://www.flixml.org | -- Alice Roosevelt Longworth 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/ and on CD-ROM/ISBN 981-02-3594-1 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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