james anderson scripsit:

>  A namespace declaration should take the form of an attribute declaration.
>  The scope of the namespace declaration is the respective element declaration, and the clos
ure of the respective contained
>  element and attribute declarations, subject to the limiting effect of contained attribute 
declarations.

The trouble with all this, however theoretically pretty, is that as a
practical matter it will be repetitious and error-prone, since xmlns
and xmlns:* attributes can appear essentially anywhere.  If they have
to be declared in a NS-aware DTD, then every element will have to
carry about gobs of these things for all the namespaces in use.

IMHO validation DTDs should not even report the presence or absence
of namespace-declaring attributes as part of validation.

>  A free <!NAMESPACE ... > form is ill suited to this end. While one could address this issu
e in combination with free
>  declarations by specifying shadowing and overriding rules for such forms, those rules can 
accomplish nothing more than to
>  duplicate the effect of propagating the bindings effected by declared attributes. In which
 case, the additional notation is redundant.

I agree, but I believe the right resolution is not to declare such
attributes.

-- 
John Cowan <jcowan@[...].com>      http://www.reutershealth.com
I amar prestar aen, han mathon ne nen,    http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
han mathon ne chae, a han noston ne 'wilith.  --Galadriel, _LOTR:FOTR_

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