XHTML and the Three Namespaces

[Simon St.Laurent]

At 11:46 AM 9/23/99 -0700, Andrew Layman wrote:
>Since there have been several recent misunderstandings of my position
>regarding namespaces and schemas, I will attempt to short-cut speculation
>and spell-out explicitly what I believe to be the correct relation between
>the two:
>
>1.	Namespaces serve to associate universally-unique identifiers with
>qualified names.
>2.	Anything so identified can have, at most, one definition.

I think point 2 is where I get off your train.

There is no reason why something that is uniquely identified can have only
one definition.  Architectural forms are a classic tool for describing this
situtation in markup, and in 'reality' there are many many many many many
many cases where you can have multiple definitions, formal or otherwise,
for the same uniquely identified thing.  (Don't get me going into
epistemology, please...)

html:p can have multiple definitions, one strict, one transitional, yet
still have the same identity.  I don't see any reason why this should be
considered a problem. While I'd like it to be identified as something
different than letter:p, I see no reason why html:p should be constrained
to a single definition.

Once this deeply fictitious #2 is knocked down, I don't think the rest of
your points stand in any 'universal' sense that must be applied to XHTML.  

Simon St.Laurent
XML: A Primer (2nd Ed - September)
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Inside XML DTDs: Scientific and Technical
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http://www.simonstl.com

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