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[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: Tool X (was Re: simple question on namespaces.)
 ----- Original Message ----- From: Jonathan Borden <jborden@m...> > The point has been raised that a namespace URI identifies a single > schema (forget content negotiation for the moment). My point is that > doctypedecls also identify a single schema, hence this problem is not new. Not really. There are some differences. 1. doctypedecls are pointing to DTDs. They're pointing to some standard thing ( DTD is standard. Useless, but standard). Namespaces are poiting to nowhere. > If this argument is used to claim 'namespaces are broken' as I've heard, > then it equally claims 'XML 1.0 is broken'. Of course nothing is perfect, so > everything is broken. DTD layer in XML is of course broken ( because it does not survive in the real life for another W3C standards, like XSL FO, for example ), but let us forget about it. My point is that namespaces ( pointing to nowhere ) are broken in different way. 2. Also, DTD layer could be ignored. I mean you can just not use DTD layer - and that's it. *Namespaces* are much harder to ignore. I still think the purpose of namespaces was/is to assign a unique context, not to fetch the URLs. Not that I enjoy bashing namespaces ( even I still think that SGML people were right and resolving form context is better than resolving from hidden 'second-name' ), but I think that situation with namespaces is different than situation with DTDs. 3. Let's think a bit about the DTD layer. We have DTD. We have a doctypedecl. doctypedecl is like a PI. It says : "validate with this DTD". Current semantics of namespace 'PI' is different. I'd say that the semantics of namespace PI is "handle prefixes/hidden lastnames". Adding *more* semantics to 'namespace PI' is just wrong, I think. It'll produce a monster 'PI' with 2 orthogonal semantics attached. To me it smells like a suspicious step. Again - I'm not sure I can say is it good or not ( in my universe there is no namespaces, because I think that resolution from the context is the way to go ) - but the point of this letter is explain what is different between namespaces and doctypedecls from my point of view. Rgds.Paul. 
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