Namespace question: Do attributes inherit the element's

John Cowan cowan at locke.ccil.org
Fri Jan 7 03:33:57 GMT 2000


Tim Bray scripsit:

> 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?  

Actually #2 and #3 amount to the same thing.  There's no way a standard
can say that an application *must* distinguish between things.
If an application chooses to treat the attributes "luxuryyacht" and
"throatwarblermangrove" as having the same significance, then
no standard can prevent it.

-- 
John Cowan                                   cowan at ccil.org
       I am a member of a civilization. --David Brin

xml-dev: A list for W3C XML Developers. To post, mailto:xml-dev at ic.ac.uk
Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/xml-dev/ and on CD-ROM/ISBN 981-02-3594-1
To unsubscribe, mailto:majordomo at ic.ac.uk the following message;
unsubscribe xml-dev
To subscribe to the digests, mailto:majordomo at ic.ac.uk the following message;
subscribe xml-dev-digest
List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa at ic.ac.uk)





More information about the Xml-dev mailing list