attribute values as qnames?

[Mark D. Anderson]

i noticed that xmlschema is using qnames in attribute values:
<schema targetNamespace="http://www.myco.com/MYPO"
        xmlns="http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/WD-xmlschema-1-19991217"
        xmlns:po="http://www.myco.com/MYPO">

 <element name="PurchaseOrder" type="po:PurchaseOrderType"/>

This is something I've wanted to, and thought was not allowed,
so I dug up xml-names, and found only this, in section 6:
  "Strictly speaking, attribute values declared to be of types ID,
  IDREF(S), ENTITY(IES), and NOTATION are also Names, and thus
  should be colon-free."

Of course, other types of attributes can have a colon, but regardless
there is no intimation that the prefixes would be expanded (and in
fact they shouldn't be, for an arbitrary attribute).

xmlschema introduces an ab initio datatype of QName (4.2.2).
but that then means that xmlschema aware processors will produce
a different infoset (if i can correctly use that word in a sentence)
than a mere run of the mill namespace-aware processor.

It seems that the "right" thing here is actually an extension to xml-names,
to make ID/IDREF/ENTITY/NOTATION names be qnames, and expanded at the
lower layer?

otherwise, for example, someone parsing two different schemas which
differ only in prefixes will conclude that the schemas are different,
which to me is inimical to what namespaces are supposed to accomplish.

-mda



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/ and on CD-ROM/ISBN 981-02-3594-1
To unsubscribe, mailto:majordomo at ic.ac.uk the following message;
unsubscribe 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)