namespaces (was Re: XML and Using It With Whitespace

[james anderson]

greetings.
our processor (the one in clos) has a fairly direct implementation of namespaces
in terms of lisp packages. as is it happens, they have a similar syntax for
names.

Chris Smith wrote:

> ...
> Clearly, you must have the DTD to make sense of the last one! However,
> I see a rather interesting side-effect, namely that this one could
> likely be added using a namespace. (Tangent: any parsers experimenting
> with namespaces?)

i had found two proposals at the time i was implementing namespaces, the
implementation is closest to the one which i can attribute only to "microsoft"
(my copy has no authorship noted) and which dates from 21.10.97.
we use the pi-form from the microsoft proposal to denote the creationof the
specified package and to load the specified dtd into that package.

i found (find still) the "<![[" syntax of henry thompson's proposed notation to
be cumbersome.
i'm also not convinced of the advantage of including multiple namespaces in a
single dtd or in a single element's content.  if i understood the meanings of
"gi" and "origin node" correctly, these are the only advantages which the
notation appeared to offer over the ability to change namespace by explicitly
qualifing the type name of a given element.
i have, in fact, restricted all definitions in a given dtd to come from the same
namespace.
i am prepared to explicitly qualify entity and content model references to
achieve links between between dtd's.

since we intern element types and attribute names, it was simple enough to
implement the scoping rules by just dynamically rebinding the package the reader
uses while parsing. element references are bound to the correct definitions by
identiying the dtds according to package while reading.


james,


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