Musing over Namespaces

[Steve Baty]

>I was thinking more along the line of English dictionary which
>allows multiple entries per word.  Each entry is qualified with
>some XPath-subset.  Company-specific entries should be possible
>if qualified with some proprietary information.

Don,

Although I agree to a certain extent that xml tags could conform to a
dictionary-style approach to registration, is there any real benefit to this
approach when each definition for a particular element requires additional
information such as "some XPath-subset" and "some proprietary information".

Why not just reference the namespace in the registered definition?

On a slightly different note, if I were to register an element such as
"purchase" which had child elements "card_type", "product_id" and "price"
how would I differentiate these child elements from somebody else's elements
of the same name? If each element in the registry had a namespace
declaration I could follow the thread of the element def'ns fairly easily.

The main problem I see in the registry approach, albeit
registry-as-dictionary, is that there would need to be some way to
differentiate between "my" "purchase" element, and the one that, say, a
stockbroker might use to define a request for shares "purchase".

The way I see it, what you are proposing would look something like:
purchase: i) element, sun microsystems, attributes:approved (true|false),
child elements (payment_type,delivery_address,...)
ii) attribute, foo_bar corp, element:transaction;

etc

Now, how might I, looking at this defn, determine who's defn of
"payment_type" I should go and look up? Perhaps instead of a dictionary
we're really talking thesaurus!?

I suppose the point is: if you need to include company-specific and XPath
information into the definition in the registry in order to identify which
element we're "really" talking about, why not use namespaces?

=========================
Steve Baty
Technical Designer
Red Square Productions
http://www.redsquare.com.au
steve at redsquare.com.au
Ph: +612 9519 4599
Fax: +612 9519 4699






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