Declaring element more than once in a DTD with namespace ?!?

[Eric Bohlman]

On Tue, 26 Oct 1999, Dan Gunter wrote:
> The reason I'm bothering the list with this rather trivial response is
> that I'm wondering if naming conventions are normal XML practice, or if
> there is a better way, short of specifying external files like
> namespaces seem to require.

This is a common misconception about namespaces.  The URI associated with
a namespace serves *only* as a unique identifier.  Period.  The namespace
is identified by the *text* of the URI *itself*, not by the content of the
resource (if it exists at all) pointed to by the URI.  It is *not*
necessary for an XML processor to fetch that resource in order to process
a document that includes elements or attributes in the namespace labelled
with that URI.

One source of confusion is that many of the schema proposals *do* use a
namespace-associated URI as the identifier of a resource that contains the
actual schema information.  But this is a facility built on top of the
namespace mechanism, not an inherent part of the namespace mechanism
itself.  All the XML processor is required to do is make the text of the
URI available to the application.



xml-dev: A list for W3C XML Developers. To post, mailto:xml-dev at ic.ac.uk
Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/xml-dev/ and on CD-ROM/ISBN 981-02-3594-1
To unsubscribe, mailto:majordomo at ic.ac.uk the following message;
unsubscribe xml-dev
To subscribe to the digests, mailto:majordomo at ic.ac.uk the following message;
subscribe xml-dev-digest
List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa at ic.ac.uk)