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RE: XML processor behavior with unused NS declarations

  • From: "Jim Tivy" <jimt@bluestream.com>
  • To: "'Evan Lenz'" <evan@evanlenz.net>,"'Chuck Bearden'" <cbearden@r...>
  • Date: Thu, 23 Jul 2009 14:19:51 -0700

RE:  XML processor behavior with unused NS declarations
Hi Evan

Ideally an Xml processor should not throw away any namespace declarations
reduntant or not since sometimes people hack things into serializations
depending on a yet unused namespace declaration.

The apache serializer - now deprecated had a restriction where there could
only be one prefix declared for a given namespace url, so it dropped
redundant declarations that someone was depending on for some downstream
processing.  I realize you can argue the downstream processing should not
rely on the upstream declaration - but hacks often make things work.

Jim 


-----Original Message-----
From: Evan Lenz [mailto:evan@evanlenz.net] 
Sent: Wednesday, July 22, 2009 2:15 PM
To: Chuck Bearden
Cc: xml-dev@lists.xml.org
Subject: Re:  XML processor behavior with unused NS declarations

Hi Chuck,

Sorry to be late to this thread. It sounds like you've gotten your 
answer already: don't throw the namespace declaration away. If you're 
interested in reading some more discussion/background on the reasons 
why, check out the "QNames in Content" section of a paper/chapter I 
wrote called "Understanding XML Namespaces".[1]

Of course, it's always safe to throw away *redundant* namespace 
declarations when serializing XML, provided you're not just serializing 
a fragment (in which case it wouldn't be redundant anymore). For 
example, if the <h2> element in your example merely repeated the 
xmlns:dc declaration verbatim, it would be safe to leave that out of 
your serialized result. (And Canonical XML *requires* such superfluous 
namespace declarations to be removed.) You just can't make any removals 
that would make a difference to the XPath data model's abstraction of 
your document.

Evan Lenz
Lenz Consulting Group

[1] http://lenzconsulting.com/namespaces/#qnames_in_content
[2] http://www.w3.org/TR/xml-c14n#SuperfluousNSDecl


Chuck Bearden wrote:
> Is a namespace-aware XML processor permitted to drop a namespace 
> declaration when no elements or attributes in that namespace are used 
> within the scope of the declaration?  Say, given this example from the 
> RDRa Primer:
>
>   <div xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/">
>      <h2 property="dc:title">The trouble with Bob</h2>
>      <h3 property="dc:creator">Alice</h3>
>      ...
>   </div>
>
> there's no danger of the processor dropping the 'xmlns:dc' 
> declaration, correct?
>
> I looked at the Namespaces in XML recommendation, and it doesn't 
> mention omitting them.  A namespace-unaware processor would treat NS 
> declarations like attributes and hence not drop them, so I reckon that 
> a NS-aware processor should match that behavior as well, but 
> confirmation from the cognoscenti is welcome!
>
> Thanks
> Chuck


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