Evan Lenz wrote:

>  I completely disagree. As Mike Kay pointed out, there's no way for an XML
>  processor to tell whether QNames are used in values. Consequently, all scope
>  information, i.e. exactly where every xmlns declaration is and what prefix
>  it uses, must always be passed to the application, regardless of whether
>  it's needed or not.

But that's hardly a lot of information, is it?

>  It's hard to believe that this was ever the intent of
>  the XML Names recommendation.

Agreed.

>  This practice blurs the distinction between
>  the XML processor and the XML application,

Maybe. I think you can make a reasonable argument either way.

>  If each layer had its own
>  namespace declaration mechanism (one for element/attribute names, and one
>  for application-specific content), then it would always be possible to throw
>  away scope information as purely lexical detail.

Yes, but the end result would be that many applications would end up
reinventing xmlns attributes.

>  I think there are still many people in the XML world (including members of
>  W3C working groups) who happily use namespaces and who are oblivious to the
>  fact that other specs are forcing [in-scope namespaces] on XML applications
>  everywhere. These people are in for a harsh wake-up call.

How are they being "forced" on applications? DOM doesn't do this (which
I think is a mistake), and it's trivial to ignore this information in
SAX if your application doesn't need them.

Put another way, I don't care about entity usage. Should I also complain
that entities are being forced on me? (As it is, I had to write a bunch
of normalization code because DOM level 1 normalization was inadequate.
I probably had better things to do with my time, but I also figure
that's the price I pay for using generic processors. It's stil a lot
easier than writing a parser...)

-- Ron

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