dita — archive

[Eliot Kimber]

Eric Sirois wrote: > While helping a user understand/integrate MathML DTD using the foreign > element the example in the proposal it used the mml prefix while the DTD > itself defines the prefix m. Another example would be the use of namespace > prefix xs and xsd for XML Schemas. When using DTDs, it is quite possible > that two different organizations can create two perfectly legal > specializations using two different prefixes. The topics created based on > the two specialization is no longer shareable. I'm not sure why you say this: each topic must be initially validated and processed in its own document context and that document context must specify the correct namespace URI for the local prefixes. Any processor that processes the two topics in the same process in order to produce a new instance reflecting the combining of those topics in some way and doesn't either rewrite the prefixes or locally declare the namespaces is simply not a namespace-aware process and therefore not a candidate for use in this case. That is, once you start using namespaces for anything, all your tools need to be namespace aware. Expecting that prefixes will be consistent and invariant is simply not realistic. In addition, this points up the fact that DTDs, as opposed to XSD schemas and similar namespace-aware constraint mechanisms, are really not viable options for handling namespaced data for the simple fact that the constraint specifications are not themselves namespace aware, meaning that you are dependent on the local prefixes. That is, DTDs cannot reflect the fact that