"Simon St.Laurent" wrote:
>
> ...
>
> Mostly I'm just fed up with people who can't seem to recognize that
> namespaces incur real costs on a lot of different kinds of XML
> processing. Fortunately, that's not everyone.
one objects, that, as soon as a serialized prefix:local-part acts as a
surrogate for an universal name, to process xml is no longer to process
"text". but then, in some sense, this has always been true. without
namespaces.
somehow it does not strike anyone as remarkable when the xml
recommendation says
"A parsed entity contains text, a sequence of characters , which may
represent markup or character data.] [ Definition : A character is an
atomic unit of text as specified by ISO/IEC 10646 [ISO/IEC 10646] (see
also [ISO/IEC 10646-2000] ). Legal characters are tab, carriage return,
line feed, and the legal characters of Unicode and ISO/IEC 10646."
after all, "text" is "text", no? but then, at least with respect to xml
processors built in java, there's this passage in "The Java TM Virtual
Machine Specification, Second Edition ", section 4.4.7 which describes
how string constants - often used to model "text", are represented
persistently. it begins
"The CONSTANT_Utf8_info structure is used to represent constant string
values.
UTF-8 strings are encoded so that character sequences that contain only
non-null ASCII characters can be represented using only 1 byte per
character, but characters of up to 16 bits can be represented. All
characters in the range '\u0001' to '\u007F' are represented by a
single byte:
..." (i leave it to the reader to imagine the rest.)
in other words, there is no ideal text. yet no one objects. i suspect,
if java were to require all applications to contend with its persistent
utf-8 encoding, rather than to express operations in terms of charAt,
indexOf, and opaque characters, one would hear the objection, "people
can't seem to realize, that unicode incurs real costs ...", but it
doesn't, and no one objects.
the same situation applies to universal names, "scoped namespaces",
bound prefixes, and etc. it would be more productive to identify the
inadequacies in the representations used to model them than to try to
trace representational artifacts back to the semantics of namespaces.
...
