[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: Registered namespace prefixes
At 10:44 PM -0500 3/7/03, Gavin Thomas Nicol wrote: >Is it > > a) To mix and match elements from arbitrary markup vocabularies > b) To mix and match elements from arbitrary markup vocabularies with > no prior agreement. > c) To mix and match elements from arbitrary markup vocabularies with > no prior agreement, and to then *process* them. > The answer is d, none of the above. The real purpose of namespaces in practice is to easily and quickly identify which vocabulary a given element comes from. That is, when I receive a DOM or SAX notification that I've got a set element, I want to know whether it's an SVG set element or an RDF set element or a MathML set element. Indeed, even when there's no confusion on name alone (e.g. svg or html) I may still want to be able to dispatch the element to the right handler without a lot of effort. namespaces enable this. In other words, it's useful for elements to have identifiers for their class as well as their own nature, a genera as well as a species. Very few people talk about this, but it is far and away the most important use of namespaces. -- +-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+ | Elliotte Rusty Harold | elharo@m... | Writer/Programmer | +-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+ | Processing XML with Java (Addison-Wesley, 2002) | | http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/xmljava | | http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN%3D0201771861/cafeaulaitA | +----------------------------------+---------------------------------+ | Read Cafe au Lait for Java News: http://www.cafeaulait.org/ | | Read Cafe con Leche for XML News: http://www.cafeconleche.org/ | +----------------------------------+---------------------------------+
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