Why namespaces?

Wed Sep 1 18:54:42 BST 1999

>'fraid I don't agree. For the *legacy* HTML you may still need to
>distinguish where it came from when it is being processed as XHTML. You
>might have a MathML document that contains an element that can contain
>some XHTML, but the source of that XHTML could be any of the three
>variants of HTML. Or you might want to convert data in a table in an
>HTML 4.0 strict document to one XML tag, and data in a table in an HTML
>4.0 transitional document to another XML element, but treat the rest of
>the tags the same, *and* only write one XSL stylesheet.

Fine, but why do you have to use the namespace for this?  You can wrap your
XHTML fragments with another element, introduce version attribute in <html>
tag, or use a ugly-but-true processing instruction?

>Obviously when everything has been tidied up, and modules of XHTML are
>being used, then you will only need the namespaces for the modules you
>want to use, and there will be no need for three.

Namespaces for individual modules?  Where did this idea come from?  XHTML
modularization is done by building DTDs using the modules as components.

Best,

Don Park    -   mailto:donpark at docuverse.com
Docuverse   -   http://www.docuverse.com

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