Reserved names and documentation

[Andrew Layman]

Jonathan's statement below is an understandable error.  My original mail was
sent replying to a claim that namespaces and validation were incompatible.
I pointed out that the two were perfectly compatible in principle, and that
any limitations one might see are limitations of current DTD expressiveness.
I then went on to mention that one could write an instance validatable
against a current DTD using an unmodified, namespace-oblivious processor,
but that you would have to recognize certain restrictions.  

Lacking that context, one might read the lines quoted from me at the end and
conclude (wrongly) that those restrictions were intrinsic to namespaces.
They are not.  They are merely limits of the current state of DTDs.

Others have pointed out either (a) algorithms for validating by modifying
DTDs or (b) new forms of schema other than DTD that are capable--today--of
supporting both validation and namespaces, with full flexibility.

I hope this clears things up,

Andrew

-----Original Message-----
From: Borden, Jonathan [mailto:jborden at mediaone.net]
Sent: Wednesday, January 06, 1999 8:16 AM
To: XML Dev
Subject: RE: Reserved names and documentation


If this is indeed the case, as it appears to be, then namespaces have no
real meaning outside of the xxx: prefix. namespaces become nothing more (or
less :-) than a standard naming mechanism for tags. the namespace referenced
urn is nothing more than an arbitrary statement of who is supposed to own
the "xxx:" namespace prefix.

the only solution (if one is needed) is to reserve use of ':' in element
names and require conforming parsers to place elements in namespaces based
upon [namespace]:[tagname] which would break the behavior of most current
parsers. OTOH this would allow namespace prefix resolution to the specified
urn.

Jonathan Borden
http://jabr.ne.mediaone.net

>
>
> Andrew Layman wrote:
>
> > [I]f one wants to write a validatable document instance using
> > namespaces, one must use exactly the prefixes written in the DTD.
>
> And one must avoid exploiting local namespace scopes and default
> namespaces.
>
> --


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