RE: a namespace problem

>I'm not sure what your tool was doing, but I think it's highly
>inadvisable to treat prefixes as anything but a
>string-that-happens-to-currently-be-associated-with-a-namespace.
>Namespace-aware tools such as XSLT, DOM, SAX, XML Schema, RELAX NG,
>etc etc will not make any distinction between foo:bar and goo:bar as
>long as foo and goo are associated with the same namespace URI in the
>same document. For example, given that both prefixes are declared
>within a document, when XSLT creates a copy of a document, the
>processor is quite within its rights to choose either prefix for a

>particular element. When you use the name() function, it could return
>either 'foo:bar' or 'goo:bar' - it doesn't matter which you used in
>the document. If you need to distinguish between a foo:bar element and
>a goo:bar element, then foo and goo should be associated with
>different namespaces.
 no argument there if I'm the xml designer, but in this case I was of course
the xml consumer, also there is one case in which it struck as being useful
to be able to switch prefixes, that being I have an xslt that writes out an?
xslt, so an xsl with the xsl prefix writes out an xsl with the tempsl
prefix, or vice-versa. However at one point we hired a new xslt guy and,
despite his having done this for a year and a half and being a datalog, I
guess that's going for a masters in computer science, he didn't really know
that there was such a thing as namespaces or that you could write xslt with
xslt and so on and so forth(it was pretty trying) anyhow as I was fiddling
around writing my prefix-switcher I thought about how much easier it would
have been for him if he could have used it to switch the before and afters
to figure out what was going on.

I solved my rss: problem with your suggestion of course, but it still does
seem like one of the most counter-intuitive things about xml I can think of.
Funny enough I came across Joe English's complaints about namespaces on
xml-dev http://lists.xml.org/archives/xml-dev/200204/msg00170.html which
reminded me of this. The question being that since my xslt used two
different prefix's for the rss namespace, did this make the xslt a
borderline document?

Cheers

Bryan


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