Article:		XML Namespaces Don't Need URIs
Subject:		That won't work
Date:		2005-04-19 03:01:51
From:		mikeday
Response to: That won't work
I think it is worth considering alternative methods for disambiguation that do not require giving every element a globally unique name, which in most cases is overkill. For example, why not use a regular attribute on the root element to identify the "type" of the document, but without needing to propagate that attribute down to the child elements like a namespace. That would allow disambiguation while eliminating the scoping issues. The different approaches taken to versioning by XSLT 2.0 and XHTML 2.0 are an interesting example. XSLT has a version attribute and keeps the same namespace, while XHTML 2.0 is in an entirely different namespace, even though most of the elements are identical to those in XHTML 1.0. I think that the approach taken by XSLT is more practical, but as I show in the article XSLT can get by quite happily without any namespace at all. The namespace is only necessary for a process which accepts many different kinds of XML documents whose root element is <xsl:stylesheet> or <xsl:transform> and needs to disambiguate them -- does such a process exist?

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• That won't work
  2005-04-27 08:31:06 EdSaltelli