From: Ian Graham <igraham(_at_)ic-unix(_dot_)ic(_dot_)utoronto(_dot_)ca>
Subject: Re: Internet-Draft: Media Feature - xmlns
Date: Thu, 24 Jan 2002 23:45:29 -0500 (EST)
On 24 Jan 2002, Simon St.Laurent wrote:
On Wed, 2002-01-23 at 22:14, Ian Graham wrote:
My only suggestion, for what it's worth, would be to allow for the
declaration (and please don't overinterpret that word ;-) ) of the 'root'
namespace for a document. That seems a reasonable distinction to make,
although you'd then have to define how such a statement interacts with
content-type declarations such as application/xml+mathml (would that, in
some twisted way, imply a default 'root'-level namespace, and if so,
how?).
Personally, I believe that the root namespace is not a definitive guide
to the contents of the document. The XSLT case is prominent, but there
...
Well, in practice there is only one namespace distinction you can make --
between the 'root' namespace and all others. Specifying both classes thus
provides, _all_ the namespace information you can provide in the absence
of the complete document instance. It seemed to me silly to avoid
providing this information when it's so easy to (notationally) do so.
I do not think that importance of a "root" namespace is that
obvious.
Some people (including me) would like to allow an XML document to have
a sequence of "root" elements rather than a single root element. Such
XML will be much more appropriate for log files. I even heard that
one widely-used XML parser already has a hidden option to allow such
XML documents. If such an extension becomes part of XML, a document
may have more than one top-level namespace.
Cheers,
Makoto