> At 11:30 AM 9/10/98 -0500, Mark Tucker wrote:
> >*****************************************
> > Camp1 : Most of this Newsgroup
> >*****************************************
> > Documents with Namespaces can be validated provided
> > the prefix abbreviations are used consistently.
>
> I don't think that too many people feel this way. I hope not,
> because the namespace draft makes it 100% clear that the prefix in
> and of itself has no meaning, and is just a short-form stand-in to
> a URI.
People are fumbling around because they're mixing up validation and
processing.
If we're talking about DTD validation (as the original message was),
then this camp is correct: as defined in the XML 1.0 REC, DTD
validation is concerned entirely with surface names and can have no
knowledge of the underlying namespace URI.
Namespace-aware XML *processing*, on the other hand, must ignore the
prefix and work with the namespace URI, as explained in the Namespaces
WD.
When the XML Schema WG finishes its work, we should have a standard
way to do namespace-aware validation; in the mean time, XML 1.0 DTDs
is all we have.
All the best,
David
--
David Megginson david@megginson.com
http://www.megginson.com/