Namespace question: Do attributes inherit the element's namespace?

David Brownell david-b at pacbell.net
Thu Jan 6 20:25:58 GMT 2000


Leigh Dodds wrote:
> 
> >   <xsl:template match="/">
> >       ...
> >
> > Consider the match attribute of the <xsl:template> element - is that
> > attribute in the XSLT namespace, or is it in no namespace?  ...
> 
> Attributes don't have namespaces. And therefore your tools are correct.
> 
> Attributes live in the per-element-type partition.

More correctly, the namespace interpretation of "unprefixed" attributes
(like "match" in this example) is not defined by the namespace spec.

The entire notion of a "per-element-type" "partition" lives only in
a non-normative appendix.  So it can't be depended on in general.


In this case, without consulting the details of the XSLT spec I'd just
suppose that the "match" is one defined by the template node, rather
than one that's global to the XSLT spec.  But the namespace spec was
written so that other interpretations could be provided, too.

Now I'm wondering if the XSLT spec is written such that the example
above is equivalent to

	<xsl:template xsl:match="/"> ...

or whether that's not explicitly defined!

- Dave

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