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

[Simon St.Laurent]

At 12:14 PM 1/6/00 -0800, Tim Bray wrote:
>The namespace spec could have said one of three things:
>
>1. These must always be treated as identical
>2. These must always be treated as different
>3. Applications can make up their minds
>
>The then-Working Group eventually went for #3.  It's kind of like
>non-Euclidean geometries; each of the three options above produces a
>self-consistent universe, so the only question is, which one do we
>want to live in?  
>
>Most applications, it seems, want to live in Universe #1, and the
>namespace spec allows them to do that.  -Tim

While this may be a solution that would get the spec out of committee, it's
the kind of solution that leads to endless questioning as well as bizarre
conformance problems when documents built for one system have to be
processed in another system.

XML's cross-platform/cross-application nature seems to call for more
consistency, not less, but that doesn't seem to be the way things go all
the time.

Simon St.Laurent
XML Elements of Style / XML: A Primer, 2nd Ed.
Building XML Applications
Inside XML DTDs: Scientific and Technical
Cookies / Sharing Bandwidth
http://www.simonstl.com

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