[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: Another look at namespaces
From: Paul Prescod <paul@p...> >There is a world of difference between saying that a namespace *is a >schema* and saying that there are a set of W3C specifications (including >XHTML) that have namespaces that have a one to one correspondance with >schemas. It's like saying that "p" doesn't have to be defined in a DTD >(because not every XML document has DTDs) but the *HTML* "p" *is* >defined in a DTD (which has been the stance since HTML 2). html:p 1) is an element for generic paragraphs (semantics); 2) is typically displayed as a block, and has sub-elements that are typically displayed inline (presentation); 3) is under the body element of an HTML document (schematic, but defined from descendnt to ancestor). That defines the html:p element type pretty completely, yet no grammar (in the sense of content models on child elements) is involved. IMHO DTDs/content-models actually disguise or fail to express the real schema in html:p, which is more like the three points above. What the content model gives is a way to validate a document, and a way to construct a document after the deep structures (classes/archetypes/extended containment/cohesion) have been abstracted away or ignored. That is a good enough model for a DTD, but hardly a good enough one for naming purposes; a name should express what a thing is, and to say that HTML has three namespaces because it has 3 DTDs is to get tripped up on a mere artifact of the modeling capabilities of DTDs. (And in any case, a strictly conforming XHTML document has to have a DOCTYPE declaration, so the namespace declarations don't actually provide any information in the document than could be found there already.) Why should <html:p>blah<rick:dog />blah</html:p> have to use a different namespace to <html:p>blah blah</html:p> ? Lets allow extensibility from the start. Rick Jelliffe 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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