Summary of Namespaces and Validation

[David Megginson]

Tim Bray writes:

 > At 11:30 AM 9/10/98 -0500, Mark Tucker wrote:

 > >*****************************************
 > >	Camp1 : Most of this Newsgroup 
 > >*****************************************
 > >		Documents with Namespaces can be validated provided
 > >		the prefix abbreviations are used consistently.
 > 
 > I don't think that too many people feel this way.  I hope not,
 > because the namespace draft makes it 100% clear that the prefix in
 > and of itself has no meaning, and is just a short-form stand-in to
 > a URI.

People are fumbling around because they're mixing up validation and
processing.

If we're talking about DTD validation (as the original message was),
then this camp is correct: as defined in the XML 1.0 REC, DTD
validation is concerned entirely with surface names and can have no
knowledge of the underlying namespace URI.

Namespace-aware XML *processing*, on the other hand, must ignore the
prefix and work with the namespace URI, as explained in the Namespaces
WD.

When the XML Schema WG finishes its work, we should have a standard
way to do namespace-aware validation; in the mean time, XML 1.0 DTDs
is all we have.


All the best,


David

-- 
David Megginson                 david at megginson.com
           http://www.megginson.com/

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