[Q] How should SAX support Namespaces?

[David G. Durand]

At 8:37 PM -0000 7/24/98, John Cowan wrote:
>I think you are over-generalizing.  The point of namespace PIs is
>to let you realize that my FOO:BAR is your BAZ:BAR, because my FOO prefix
>has the same namespace URI as your BAZ prefix.  So your document can
>refer to some element of mine as BAZ:BAR, and a proper XLL engine
>will actually return FOO:BAR.  There is no need, IMHO, to handle
>the case that you insist on finding literally "BAZ:BAR" as an
>element name.

It is not at all clear that XLL will work that way. It's designed to work
for XML 1.0 not necessarily XML 1.0 + namespaces. I'd be surprised If
namespace processing for linking is not at least optional (layered) in that
same way that namespaces are purported to be.

Of course, the XLL draft is not that recent, and the official XLL workgroup
has not yet been constituted. What this really means is that _no_
assumptions can be made about whether XLL will be able to search by
namespace-qualified names. It is _much_ more likely that search by actual
element ID _will_ be allowed however.

There is also talk of separating out a "real" query language since Xpointer
is inadequate as a general query langauge; if that took place, namespace
support might end up in queries but not xpointers. This would even make a
kind of sense, since Xpointers are about rbust addressing in a _known_
document, and queries are about searching across _unknown_ documents.

  -- David


_________________________________________
David Durand              dgd at cs.bu.edu  \  david at dynamicDiagrams.com
Boston University Computer Science        \  Sr. Analyst
http://www.cs.bu.edu/students/grads/dgd/   \  Dynamic Diagrams
--------------------------------------------\  http://www.dynamicDiagrams.com/
MAPA: mapping for the WWW                    \__________________________



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