Paul Prescod wrote:

> 
>  4.9) Why are special attributes used to declare XML namespaces?
> 
>  I don't know the answer to this question, but the likely reason is that
>  they simplify the process of moving fragments of one document to another
>  document. An early draft of the XML namespaces recommendation proposed
>  using processing instructions to declare XML namespaces. While these
>  were simple to read and process, they weren't easy to move to other
>  documents. Attributes, on the other hand, are intimately attached to the
>  elements being moved.
> 

Yeah. What I understand is that the ability to locally bind namespaces is
critical to the ability to stream process XML document composition, an
element can define its own namespace prefix binding context. We recently
went over this when I declared a namespace best practice of declaring the
namespace bindings at the root element. I still maintain this is a best
practice but best practices are meant to be broken for such efficiency
reasons, and hence the ability to declare local namespace bindings is the
correct one (IMHO)

Jonathan


-----------------------------------------------------------------
The xml-dev list is sponsored by XML.org <http://www.xml.org> , an
initiative of OASIS <http://www.oasis-open.org> 

The list archives are at http://lists.xml.org/archives/xml-dev/

To subscribe or unsubscribe from this list use the subscription
manager: <http://lists.xml.org/ob/adm.pl>