RE: namespace qualifications

[Dare Obasanjo <kpako@xxxxxxxxx>]

<aaronSw>
This seems like a really bizarre thing to say. Would
it be equally OK to say "It's not a problem for
elements to be unqualified, as long as they are only
used inside qualified elements"? How can you say for
sure no one else is ever going to want to use that
element, or that attribute?
</aaronSw>

As bizarre as this sounds this thinking is actually
formalized in W3C XML Schema. Look up what is meant by
"local elements" and what the attribute
elementFormDefault on the xs:schema element actually
means. 

<aaronSw>
This isn't just a theoretical concern. Assuming we
stick with the superstitious version attribute, I can
see wanting to come up with my own container for atom
entries that was better or different in some way, and
creating a new element in a new namespace for it, say
aaronsw:bowl. But I might want to retain atom's
versioning scheme so that an aggregator that supported
feeds and bowls would follow the same versioning rules
for each. That's currently impossible
</aaronSw>

This is either a theoretical concern or an irrelevant
concern. It is theoretical because there is no way for
an aggregator faced with an unknown XML format that
happens to reuse some elements from ATOM to know that
the feed is logically an ATOM feed. On the other hand,
if the aggregator knows how to map between this
unknown format and ATOM either syntactically via XSLT
or semantically via RDF/OWL/DAML/whatever then whether
the attribute is in a namespace or not should not
matter. 

=====
THINGS TO DO IF I BECOME AN EVIL OVERLORD #59
I will never build a sentient computer smarter than I am.

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software
http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com