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[Elliotte Rusty Harold] > Consider the following document: > > <root xmlns="[^^^^||||]"> > ... > </root> > > All of the characters used as values of the xmlns attribute are > illegal in namespace URIs according to RFC 2396 and legal in XML > attribute values. > > Is this document namespace well-formed? > > I've been hunting through the Namespaces spec and I can find no BNF > grammar production or namespace constraint that indicates the value > of an xmlns or xmlns:prefix attribute actually has to be a legal URI > reference. They key seems to be section 6, which leaves out any > restriction on namespace names as part of the definition of > conformance. > Seems to me it is covered in section 1: 1) a namespace identifier is "identified by a URI reference [RFC2396] " 2) ... "URI references can contain characters not allowed in names, so cannot be used directly as namespace prefixes". and in Section 2: 3) "[Definition:] The attribute's value, a URI reference, is the namespace name identifying the namespace." As I read these passages, they make it clear that the string identifying a namespace must comply with RFC 2396. Since the namespace Rec does not use the term "well-formed", it does not change the meaning of "well-formed". Also it does not prescribe error behavior, so that must be up to the application. > What have I missed? Where does the spec normatively require that the > value of an xmlns attribute actually be a URI reference? Item 3) clearly normatively constrains the attribute value (at least to me). >If it does not so require, then I still wouldn't recommend that people use > non-URIs as namespace names, but I might have to allow for that > possibility in my software. > I'd allow for it anyway. Is there anything as misused as URIs? Cheers, Tom P
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