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Re: My report on experiments with unused namespaces

• From: "Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@simonstl.com>
• To: Amelia A Lewis <amyzing@talsever.com>
• Date: Wed, 15 Sep 2010 16:12:07 -0400

On 9/15/10 2:03 PM, Amelia A Lewis wrote:
> In short: I don't see the point.  A namespace declaration is merely a
> particular form of attribute use which defines a certain sort of
> information.  In the best of all possible worlds, a namespace would
> only be defined when it was needed to scope an element or attribute use
> ('scuse, I need to go cultivate my garden ...), but since multiple
> prominent uses of namespaces use the scoping mechanism for the
> *content* of attributes and elements, there is no way for a processor
> to know whether a namespace declaration is significant or not.

It's been a while, but I have heard of hacks which used namespace 
declarations as kind of a backchannel for propagating information 
through its scope.  The application had to know what it was looking for, 
and the 'extra' namespaces had a habit of getting pruned by other tools, 
but in a constrained context, it was fun.

Not the best of all possible worlds...

-- 
Simon St.Laurent
http://simonstl.com/

• Follow-Ups:
  • Re: My report on experiments with unused namespaces
    • From: David <dlee@calldei.com>

• References:
  • My report on experiments with unused namespaces
    • From: "Costello, Roger L." <costello@mitre.org>
  • Re: My report on experiments with unused namespaces
    • From: Amelia A Lewis <amyzing@talsever.com>