Namespacing included XML (was Re: [emergency] Addition ideas forEDXL Distribution)

[Art Botterell <acb@incident.com>]

At 9:00 PM -0600 5/2/05, Ellis, David wrote:
>4.  Since there is a one-to-one correspondence with Message Element 
>and Content Object, It would be a lot easier to "specify" the 
>content namespace in the "messageElement" element definition to 
>ensure consistent namespace for all subsequent child Message 
>Elements.

Good point.  In fact, the more I think about this... maybe it would 
be simpler all round if we just asserted an EXPLICIT namespace for 
the "foreign" content... e.g., "<messageElement 
xmlns:inc='http://ecommerce.org/schema'>"... and required the 
applications to hang that namespace prefix ("inc:", in this example) 
on any included or excerpted XML.

Otherwise, if we futz around with the default namespace like we have 
it now, we'll still wind up having to explicitly namespace some of 
the EDXL-DE tags (at a minimum the <messageElement> tag itself) back 
to their native namespace while making the foreign content look to be 
native.  Except when the included content wasn't XML, in which case 
we wouldn't.  (Other than on odd numbered Thursdays during leap 
years... in which cases we'll all just go get a beer...)

- Art