XML Namespace

[Steve Dahl]

I've got a confusion of sorts about what the intention is, in the
separation of Namespace URI versus prefix.

At the end of Section 1 and in Section 2, it says that Namespaces are
identified by URI, because these names have the properties of uniqueness
and persistence, and that the prefix used commonly in qualified names is
merely a proxy for the URI, because the URI contains characters that are
illegal in XML names (and maybe also to reduce clutter, since prefixes
are much shorter than URIs.

>From that, I inferred that prefixes are assumed to lack either
uniqueness or persistence (or both), or else they could have been used
as the namespace name to begin with. This means that it's not impossible
that I might have a collision between two different Namespaces being
associated with the same prefix. In that case, what would I need to do
if I wanted to mix element types from two different DTDs that had the
same prefix but which are intended to be bound to different Namespaces?

For example, if the file a.dtd declared one element ns:x, and the file
b.dtd declared another element ns:x, how could I use both of them in the
same document, without copying one of the DTDs and changing the prefixes
in the copy?



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