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

[Simon St.Laurent]

At 07:12 PM 1/6/00 -0500, David Megginson wrote:
>Junk in standards is like rat feces in chocolate bars -- there's
>always going to be some, but we try to keep it to a minimum.  Think of
>ANSI C trigraphs, XML unparsed entities, and Unicode combining
>characters, three things that nobody but the
>hard-core-I'm-going-to-prove-they're-useful-if-it-kills-me zealots are
>ever going to use.

Yep - but unparsed entities will at least reach the application in the same
form no matter what validating parser is used.  This namespace issue
(process as you like it) is the kind of rat feces that can obscure critical
information, and create mysterious failures that only the most devoted
readers of XML-dev have any hope of figuring out.

So far as I've seen, unparsed entities haven't generated the intense level
of public discussion that namespaces have, no matter how disliked they may
be.  It only took me a year to really figure them out, but in that year
they didn't do many harm.  I'm not sure that developers will be able to say
the same for this namespace issue, which can make seemingly simple and
obvious things bizarrely complex.

Oh well.  More work for consultants and authors, I suppose.

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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