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Re: My report on experiments with unused namespaces

• From: David <dlee@calldei.com>
• To: xml-dev@lists.xml.org
• Date: Wed, 15 Sep 2010 16:16:52 -0400

  I belive xproc would be one example where in-scope namespaces can be 
used inside attribute values (such as select="foo:bar") but are 
otherwise unused in the 'xml proper'.


David A. Lee
dlee@calldei.com
http://www.xmlsh.org


On 9/15/2010 4:12 PM, Simon St.Laurent wrote:
> 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...
>

• 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>
  • Re: My report on experiments with unused namespaces
    • From: "Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@simonstl.com>