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Re: Localisation: Character Encodings & RDBMS,Unicode->UTF-8 with Round

• From: Tim Bray <tbray@t...>
• To: Frank Boumphrey <bckman@i...>, xml-dev@x...,rpbourret@h...
• Date: Wed, 30 Aug 2000 12:17:54 -0700

At 12:58 PM 30/08/00 -0400, Frank Boumphrey wrote:
>Section 2 of the Namespaces rec declares
...
>ie
>  <foo:a  xmlns:foo="">In the foo namespace</foo:a>
>is illegal
>Can anyone tell me the reasoning behind this?

Yes, that's illegal.  My memory is fuzzy, but one of
the important reasons is that if you have a default
namespace <x xmlns="default-ns-uri"> and then you
want to unset the default so there is none, the 
obvious way to do that is <subX xmlns="">, which
doesn't mean the default ns is "", it means that
there isn't a default ns.  It would be distinctly
weird if the semantics of <x xmlns=""> were wildly
different from <x xmlns:foo="">.

Also, the WG was (quite rightly, as history has
shown) very nervous about relative URIs as 
namespace names, and "" only makes sense as a
relative name. -Tim

• Follow-Ups:
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    • From: james anderson <james.anderson@m...>

• References:
  • Re: Localisation: Character Encodings & RDBMS,Unicode->UTF-8 with Round Tripping
    • From: Frank Boumphrey <bckman@i...>

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