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[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: My report on experiments with unused namespaces
 > It's only a concern if you choose to be concerned about it. As all > commenters have noted, there is no definition of "unused". Any markup > in the document may be used by someone. There are several reasonable starting points for defining what parts of an XML document are information-bearing: two that agree reasonably closely (though not 100%) are the XML canonicalization spec and the XDM data model. These both provide answers to questions such as whether CDATA boundaries are significant (no), whether whitespace within a start tag is significant (no), whether the choice of hex or decimal character references is significant (no), whether whitespace in element-only-content is significant (yes, with caveats), and whether namespace prefixes are significant (yes, with caveats). As a first cut, information has to be treated as significant if it survives XML canonicalization. Which means it MAY be used by someone. A stricter view might be whether it SHOULD be used by anyone; one might imagine a stronger form of canonicalization that, for example, moves all namespace declarations to the outermost element, changes the prefixes, and deletes namespace declarations that are not used in any element or attribute names. You might take the view that people should write their applications in such a way that they continue to work after such a change; and others might legitimately take a different view. This is in the realm of "best practice", where no two people will agree. Michael Kay Saxonica 
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