Namespaces hate validation!

[Ron Daniel]

Murray Maloney said:

> At 08:46 PM 1/5/99 -0500, Tim Bray wrote:
> 
[Outline of Tim's procedure for validating in the presence
of namespaces deleted]
> >OK, this is a bit tedious but contains NO ROCKET SCIENCE.  The 
> >syntactic problems of validating in the presence of namespaces are
> >just not that hard.
> 
> Well, tedious enough to make it unlikely that anyone will use
> validation on documents that utilize namespaces. It is hard.
> It is too hard.
[Ron Daniel]  Not all uses of namespaces are hard to validate.
For example, assume I'm defining a file format and want to
put Dublin Core descriptors in the header. I can keep the Dublin
Core material in its own namespace. Developing such a DTD, and
validating such files, is no harder if I use namespaces than if
I don't. In fact, it may be slightly (but only slightly) easier
since someone may have provided DTD fragments for the Dublin Core
elements. It also enables other people's robots (if they are DC and
namespace savvy) to harvest those files if they stumble across them.

Now, I'm the first to admit that this is a LONG way from the
dream of on-the-fly composition of compound documents. Its only
an incremental step towards reuse. But it is a step.

Ron Daniel Jr.
DATAFUSION, Inc.
139 Townsend Street, Ste. 100
San Francisco, CA  94107
415.222.0100 fax 415.222.0150 
rdaniel at datafusion.net
http://www.datafusion.net


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