Another errata?

Fri Jan 29 22:11:51 GMT 1999

At 04:53 PM 1/29/99 -0500, John Cowan wrote:
>> <html xmlns="http://namespaceplace.com/html.dtd">
>> <body bgcolor="#ffffff">
>> 
>> then body is part of the http://namespaceplace.com/html.dtd namespace, but
>> its attribute bgcolor is not?  (bgcolor belongs to no namespace)
>
>No.  An attribute not explicitly labeled with a prefix belongs to the
>same namespace as its element.

No.  Adam Donahue is correct on this one.  The spec says explicitly,
and then belabors the point with examples; defaults don't apply to
attributes.  The only attribute that has a namespace is one that
has a prefix.

Now clearly, an application processing an unprefixed attribute will 
know the namespace (if any) of the element to which it's attached,
and may well use that information.  For example, in 

  <html:a href="..."> 

an HTML processor may (& probably should) choose to process that href 
attribute in an HTML-ish way; BUT, the href attribute is not, in the
formal terminology of the spec, in the html or any other namespace. -T.

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