Restricted Namespaces for XML

[James Clark]

Don Park wrote:
 
> If I read James Clark's message correctly, I believe he is in favor of
> chopping out some features out of the "Namespaces for XML"

I am in favour of chopping out some of the conceptual apparatus used to
explain the features of "Namespaces for XML" not chopping out the
features themselves.

> All the namespace declarations must be at the root element and prefixes are
> global to the document (well, within the root element).

Although restricting namespace declarations to the root element makes it
a little easier to do namespace processing on input, it makes things
much harder on output if you want to generate a document that combines
multiple XML input documents.  For example, consider an XLink filter
that resolves transclusions.  This restriction would require that it
read all the input XML documents completely before it could produce any
output, because it would need to move the declarations of the prefixes
on the transcluded document roots up to the root of the generated output
document.  I also doubt it would be any easier to understand: you're
making a special case of the root element rather than treating all
elements uniformly.

I can't think of any feature in XML Namespaces that isn't really
important for some significant application of XML Namespaces.

I recommend reading

 http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-webarch-extlang

for some background on the requirements that motivated the design of XML
Namespaces.

James



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