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On Thu, 2 Sep 1999, Edd Dumbill wrote: > On Thu, Sep 02, 1999 at 02:58:54AM +0100, Mark Birbeck wrote: > > [James Tauber:] > > > Namespaces (by my reading of the spec) are for distinguishing > > > element/attribute vocabularies *within an instance*. > > > > Not so. [...] Namespaces (by my reading of the spec) are for > > distinguishing element/attribute vocabularies *within the whole world*. The first view is a straightforward reading of the first two paragraphs of the XML Namespace spec's "Motivation and Summary". The second view is a straightforward reading of the third paragraph. The basic problem is that the statement "document constructs should have universal names" is a (IMHO, whopping) non-sequitur. > The namespace URI reference identifies the namespace. So, yes, > namespaces can be used to distinguish vocabularies globally, put > prefixes can't. Yes, except for the unstated agendas for reserved names that might be lurking:) > Therefore implementations shouldn't assume anything from a prefix, Something tells me that, unfortunately, this is precisely what some implementors would like to do, and therefore some implementations will wind up doing. > It is clearly a goal of XHTML to allow inclusion of other XML namespaces > in a document, therefore XHTML ought to define the namespace within > which it sits. But why now? What's the rush? > So, if a namespace does indeed == a schema then we need three of them. > > The implication of this to me seems to be nothing less than the ultimate > replacement of the DTD declaration by the namespace declaration. A lot of this - actually, to my mind, all of this - seems to be the cart before horse. Personally, I consider XML-ization of HTML a bad idea, so I really don't care how many angels have to dance on the head of this pin. But it was my understanding that modularization of HTML was an integral part of the XML-ization, so I can't see why that activity - important in its own right - has been shunted into the background for the sake of an ill-defined, easily-misunderstood will-o'the-wisp add-on. Put it this way: who are the implementors who have declared that no immediate decision on namespaces is a show-stopper? Arjun xml-dev: A list for W3C XML Developers. To post, mailto:xml-dev@i... Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/xml-dev/ and on CD-ROM/ISBN 981-02-3594-1 To (un)subscribe, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; (un)subscribe xml-dev To subscribe to the digests, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; subscribe xml-dev-digest List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa@i...)
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