Re: [xX][mM][lL] is reserved

Chris Maden (crism@ora.com)
Tue, 5 May 1998 13:54:09 -0400 (EDT)

[Chris Lovett]
> "A Name is a token beginning with a letter or one of a few
> punctuation characters, and continuing with letters, digits,
> hyphens, underscores, colons, or full stops, together known as name
> characters. Names beginning with the string "xml", or any string
> which wouild match (('x' | 'X')('m' | 'M') ('l' | 'L')) are reserved
> for standardization in this or future versions of this
> specification".

[...]

> Can the XML spec gurus clarify this paragraph ? Thanks.

The spec seems clear to me. Names may not begin with "xml" or any
case variation thereof. What's unambiguous?

If you're asking if it *should* say what it does, the answer is yes,
to me. The XML WG can always choose to free the string for wider use
later, but would be unable to capture it again having done so. As
with many other decisions, they've chosen to err (if an error it is)
on the side of caution.

However, one side effect of this is that a conformant XML 1.0
processor may reject a conformant XLink document for using "xml:link"
as an attribute name.

-Chris

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