Why not PIs for namespace declarations?

[Arjun Ray]

On Thu, 23 Dec 1999, David Brownell wrote:

> What you're suggesting is that PIs be lexically scoped.
> (That's what Andrew seems to mean by "tree" scope.)

Especially "local".  The "requirement" that had to be met, apparently, was
that the syntactic device announcing a "local" lexical scope had to be
"locally" available itself (thus ruling out, e.g., stuff in the internal
subset that would be indefinitely "far away".)

> And in fact, there's nothing in the world preventing the definition of
> a particular PI from using lexical scope. One doesn't need all PIs to
> work that way; only one.

Yes.  There are only two natural scoping constructs in XML: elements and
marked sections.  There was no consensus on how MS syntax could be
extended (if at all), so the issue effectively became one of working with
the element structure.  A PI pointing to an ID could have been enough.

> I've no intention of reopening the debate on this topic (we're stuck
> with attributes), but I've got this strange belief that truth should
> be told, so I couldn't let this one slip by.

On the archive we've been refered to for the details, it was quoted:

"The making of laws, and of sausages, should be hidden from children"


Arjun



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