Why SAX needs namespace support

[Michael.Kay at icl.com]

> To put this another way, namespaces are merely a syntactic mechanism
> to allow each element type and attribute name in a document to be
> qualified by some URI.  The DOM should obviously preserve this 
> information, but I can't see why it should be concerned with 
> the syntactic sugar that was used to express it. -Tim

Well one minor technicality is that if it didn't preserve the syntactic
sugar, it would violate the XML 1.0 spec, which requires that all attribute
values be available to the application*. This is all part of the general
problem that namespaces don't work as an optional feature layered above XML:
they must become core.

I will try to avoid using namespaces until they are properly integrated into
SAX, DOM, DTDs, and indeed the XML specification itself.

Mike Kay

*On re-reading, the XML spec doesn't say this very clearly. It suggests it.
But that's a different thread...

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