Namespaces: prefixes vs. no prefixes

Ron Bourret rbourret at dvs1.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de
Tue Jul 28 20:11:21 BST 1998


This is undoubtedly a no-brainer, but it has just now occurred to me that the 
following two DTDs are almost certainly not the same.

<!ELEMENT A (B+)>
<!ELEMENT B (#PCDATA)>

and

<!ELEMENT FOO:A (FOO:B+)>
<!ELEMENT FOO:B (#PCDATA)>

Originally, I had thought that instances of the first case would be recognized 
by applications designed for the second -- that is, an application would have a 
"default" namespace) -- but now I am leaning the other way.  The namespace spec 
does not describe how to compare names, so I am assuming that they are first 
resolved into fully qualified names and then compared stringwise.

One of the consequences of this is that if namespace prefixes are used in a DTD, 
they must be used in both the instance file and in the application.  (Of course, 
it is easy to imagine an application implementing a default namespace for 
backward compatibility, but this is outside the spec.)

Could somebody confirm that these DTD are, in fact, different?

-- Ron Bourret

xml-dev: A list for W3C XML Developers. To post, mailto:xml-dev at ic.ac.uk
Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/xml-dev/
To (un)subscribe, mailto:majordomo at ic.ac.uk the following message;
(un)subscribe xml-dev
To subscribe to the digests, mailto:majordomo at ic.ac.uk the following message;
subscribe xml-dev-digest
List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa at ic.ac.uk)




More information about the Xml-dev mailing list