> Yes, a syntax virtually identical to yours, that allowed multiple namespace
> declarations in a single attribute was considered. The resulting syntactic
> problems swayed the WG away from that approach. (Some of the issues -- you
> now need an internal quoting mechanism, or a careful proscription on the
> legal characters in a URI, in order to allow proper separation of the pairs.
> It gets even messier to come up with a syntax to declare the default
> prefix.)
Space (0x20) is clearly proscribed in both URIs and NCNames, and could
have been used. (Indeed, I am leaning toward using it in the next
version of NamespaceFilter.) In addition, a chosen non-ASCII character,
perhaps represented by a numeric entity reference, would have done the
trick, since URIs only allow ASCII in the external representation,
and Names allow only a small subset of the full Unicode repertoire.
-- John Cowan http://www.ccil.org/~cowan cowan@ccil.org You tollerday donsk? N. You tolkatiff scowegian? Nn. You spigotty anglease? Nnn. You phonio saxo? Nnnn. Clear all so! 'Tis a Jute.... (Finnegans Wake 16.5)