[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: Namespaces, schemas, Simon's filters.
>Actually, while I've argued as to why making local elements unqualified is a >good thing from the point of view of what local elements are, no one has >given a similar argument for why local elements should be qualified. The >arguments in favor of qualifying them have been simply "I don't like >unqualified elements because I can't use the namespace to uniquely identify >the element" - when namespaces fail to uniquely identify different local >elements anyway. A fair question. To elaborate it a bit, the argument is that if you need the containing-element context to identify the element, then it makes no difference whether it's qualified or not because you can only interpret it in that context. Two reasons spring to mind: - Even if it doesn't tell you exactly what it means, it still tells you where to go to find the answer. It's immediately clear that it's *one* of the the foo elements from the xyzzy namespace. - Often (take that with a pinch of salt: like most people, I've only written a few schemas) all the foo elements in the xyzzy namespace *mean* the same thing. It's just that some of them are restricted in different ways because of the context. For example, in my serialization of the XML infoset, the <children> child of the <documentTypeDeclaration> element and the <children> child of the <element> element are both in some sense the same thing, but the allowed content is different and by using local elements I can give them different content models and get better validation. After all, if they weren't in some way the same I wouldn't have given them the same name. -- Richard
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