Re: Namespace Identifiers - URI, URN, URL?

On Wed, Aug 29, 2001 at 08:12:38AM -0400, Hewko, Doug wrote:
> Thanks for the reply. This might be one of the great unsolved mysteries, but
> isn't it confusing since "'xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/TR/WD-xsl" does not
> necessarily refer to a real URL? Just wondering why the W3 couldn't use
> something else that doesn't start with "http"..
> 

Read the XML Namespaces Recommendation and James Clark's explanation
of namespaces (see my other reply).  I agree, it has to be one of the
most confusing documents the W3C has ever come up with.

> Ohh...so I do not need the <?xml ... > declaration in the stylesheets? Quick
> side question; does having that cause any problems?
> 

No.  Just be sure your document uses only UTF-8 characters if you
don't put it, because that's the default character set defined by the
XML Recommendation.  Any non-UTF-8 character sequences in your XML
document (such as extended ASCII/ISO-8859-1 characters) will cause
your XML document to become invalid, and hence unparseable by any
conformant XML parser.  It's better to put the XML declaration in and
explicitly state the character set you use, e.g.:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>

or

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="US-ASCII"?>

or whatever.

Answer to your second question: having the XML declaration will only
cause problems if the character set you declared there does not match
the character set your document is actually in.  Beware.

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