[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: illegal namespace usage
Simon St.Laurent writes: > Basically, none of these applications is really doing anything > exciting that couldn't have been done just by focusing on the > prefix. While (hopefully) they do check beyond the prefix, none of > them has explored the terra incognita that's out there. That's not quite true. While it is true that certain XML features, like attribute default values and DTD-based validation, tend to grind gears a bit with Namespaces, there is a big advantage over simple prefix matching because prefixes cannot be guaranteed unique, and Namespace URIs can. This matters an awful lot for blind data exchange. To give a simple example, consider HTML browsers. Let's say that we didn't have Namespaces, but we all agreed that basic HTML elements and attributes had unprefixed names. Most people would probably concede the prefix 'ms:' to Microsoft and the prefix 'ns:' to Netscape (and maybe also 'mz:'), so there wouldn't be any risk of collision there. What about the rest of the world, though, especially the smaller vendors? I'm probably safe taking the prefix 'megg:' for my HTML extensions (just as I didn't have to pay anyone on e-bay for megginson.com), but are you sure that there is only one vendor or document-type designer in the whole world who will want to use the prefix 'real:', or 'news:'? Without Namespaces, you end up having to set up a prefix registry, and it gets silly fast (people will compete for good prefixes like they compete for domain names). 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/ 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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