Re: patterns and multiple namespaces

At 10:24 PM 9/29/99 +0800, James Tauber wrote:
>This approach might be bearable if XPath or XSLT were modified to make it
>easier:
>
><xsl:ns prefix="h" uri-start="http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml"/>
>...
><xsl:template match="h:h1">...
>
>but that's *definitely not* going to happen in 1.0 and probably not ever.

So we're kind of stuck, I guess.

>Another approach would be to add to all XHTML elements an attribute
>"schema-family" with value "XHTML". It could be #FIXED in the DTD so no one
>would ever have to type it, but you could say:
>
>match="h1[schema-family='XHTML']"

This one is actually pretty funny, sort of a creeping
architectural-forms-like use of attributes to get around the limitations of
attributes.  It does have the advantage of working, but seems like a
workaround that deeply violates the philosophy behind what's being gone
around.

There's also the problem noted in 5.8.2 of the CSS2 spec (which I'm
shamelessly quoting from another Ian Hickson message on www-style -
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/1999Sep/0135.html):
# 5.8.2 Default attribute values in DTDs
#
# Matching takes place on attribute values in the document tree. For
# document languages other than HTML, default attribute values may be
# defined in a DTD or elsewhere. Style sheets should be designed so
# that they work even if the default values are not included in the
# document tree.

Given that not all documents being styled may have gone through a parser
that supports external subsets and PEs, this seems like wise advice.  Of
course, you could put it in the internal subset, but that's one declaration
per element - yuck!

I don't suppose they'd build that into the XHTML 1.0 DTD...


Simon St.Laurent
XML: A Primer (2nd Ed - September)
Building XML Applications
Inside XML DTDs: Scientific and Technical
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http://www.simonstl.com


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