[xX][mM][lL] is reserved

Chris Lovett clovett at microsoft.com
Tue May 5 19:16:55 BST 1998


Spec issue:

Section 2.3 paragraph 3:

	"A Name is a token beginning with a letter or one of a few
punctuation characters, and continuing with letters, digits, hyphens,
underscores, colons, or full stops, together known as name characters.
Names beginning with the string "xml", or any string which wouild match
(('x' | 'X')('m' | 'M') ('l' | 'L')) are reserved for standardization in
this or future versions of this specification".

Currently MSXML disallows "xml" from being used as a "namespace", for
example: "xml:foo" since this seems to be the way the XML spec is heading
with "xml:space" and "xml:lang".  So is the above paragraph just a little
too restrictive and should it include the colon ?  If not then the following
very common XML example is illegal:

	<XML>
		This is a test.
	</XML>

Tim Bray's web site (http://www.xml.com/axml/axml.html) says explicitly that
"xmlu" is an illegal name, but James Clark's expat seems to allow this ?? 

Can the XML spec gurus clarify this paragraph ? Thanks.

Chris Lovett.

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