Table of contents

Appendices

3 Advanced Concepts I: Namespaces, Schemas & Qualification

ref38A schema can be viewed as a collection (vocabulary) of type definitions and element declarations whose names belong to a particular namespace called a target namespace. Target namespaces enable us to distinguish between definitions and declarations from different vocabularies. For example, target namespaces would enable us to distinguish between the declaration for element in the XML Schema language vocabulary, and a declaration for element in a hypothetical chemistry language vocabulary. The former is part of the http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema target namespace, and the latter is part of another target namespace.

ref22When we want to check that an instance document conforms to one or more schemas (through a process called schema validation), we need to identify which element and attribute declarations and type definitions in the schemas should be used to check which elements and attributes in the instance document. The target namespace plays an important role in the identification process. We examine the role of the target namespace in the next section.

The schema author also has several options that affect how the identities of elements and attributes are represented in instance documents. More specifically, the author can decide whether or not the appearance of locally declared elements and attributes in an instance must be qualified by a namespace, using either an explicit prefix or implicitly by default. The schema author's choice regarding qualification of local elements and attributes has a number of implications regarding the structures of schemas and instance documents, and we examine some of these implications in the following sections.