Namespaces, Architectural Forms, and Sub-Documents

[Chris Maden]

[David Megginson]
> "namespace:gi" element type names are unsuitable for several reasons:

[...]

> Why are people worried about writing specs to solve a problem that
> already has good, working, available solutions?

The problem (as I see it) is not one of including pieces of existing
documents, nor of structural validation.  The main reason for
namespaces is semantic inheritance.  I want to write a scientific
research paper quickly.  HTML has the overall document structure and
components that I need; MathML has equations; CML has chemical
formulæ.  I should be able to say that I'm using those things,
associate stylesheets, and have my browser know that <html:a> should
be styled with the "a" rule from the HTML stylesheet.

It should be *possible* to create a DTD to which such a document
complies, but I am not as interested in automatic validation of a
namespace document.  The interrelational issues are, I think, too
complex to solve; in the example above, I would need to change the
text-containing HTML elements' content models to include chemical and
mathematical markup, and maybe allow HTML markup in MathML theorems.
Pushing selected information into the content models is too ugly.

-Chris
-- 
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