attribute values as qnames?

[Rick Jelliffe]

From: Mark D. Anderson <mda at discerning.com> 

>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).
 
To reference the name of an element type in an
attribute, one can use the namespace prefix: this is what
XPaths do, for example.  So the XML schema processor 
may indeed have to have the xmlns prefix->URI mappings 
available. A namespace processor will not resolve values
of attributes, merely names of elements and attributes (AFAIK,
but I am easily confusable.)

That type attribute is not an ID, IDREF, ENTITY or NOTATON
but a %QName;  (i.e., CDATA) so it conforms to the XML NS Spec.

Rick Jelliffe


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)