On 9/15/10 2:03 PM, Amelia A Lewis wrote:
> In short: I don't see the point. A namespace declaration is merely a
> particular form of attribute use which defines a certain sort of
> information. In the best of all possible worlds, a namespace would
> only be defined when it was needed to scope an element or attribute use
> ('scuse, I need to go cultivate my garden ...), but since multiple
> prominent uses of namespaces use the scoping mechanism for the
> *content* of attributes and elements, there is no way for a processor
> to know whether a namespace declaration is significant or not.
It's been a while, but I have heard of hacks which used namespace
declarations as kind of a backchannel for propagating information
through its scope. The application had to know what it was looking for,
and the 'extra' namespaces had a habit of getting pruned by other tools,
but in a constrained context, it was fun.
Not the best of all possible worlds...
--
Simon St.Laurent
http://simonstl.com/
