re: [ciq] An important question between Schema and DTD

[David RR Webber - XMLGlobal <Gnosis_@compuserve.com>]

Message text written by Ram Kumar
>
I do not know how we are going to support this feature in DTD. Is there
any good document that talks abouthandling namespaces in DTD? Please
advise.
This is a very important issue if we want to move forward with namespace
support for our standards.

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Ram,

The OAG has been looking at this too.  There users have reacted strongly 
against prefixes to tags as being really tough on interoperability.

Instead most people recognize it is easier and makes more sense to
compartmentalize content within a parent tag and allow the XPath
context to define the use.

I.e.

<Billing>
     <Address/>
</Billing>
<Delivery>
    <Address/>
</Delivery>

Also - this avoids the issue of namespace parsing generally.

I'm hoping V2.0 of XML will solve this by canning namespace, except
as an annotation hint, and taking the better <grammer> approach that
RELAX uses.

Also notice that namespace really is an impediment to re-use of content,
so if I receive :

<Billing xmlns:foo="somelocation" >
   <foo:Address/>
</Billing>

and then I want to write this out to:

<Custinvoice>
    <Address/>
</Custinvoice>

then I have a bunch of needless parsing to strip off the foo: part of all
the tagnames.

That's just a simple example.  Where multiple namespaces occur within
a block of content it becomes a nightmare to figure out which is valid
where in context when inheriting definitions from different schema parents.

To me this all has AVOID written all over it.   I'm strongly of the opinion
that namespace is a vaccination for a disease that few people have 
been found to actually contracted - and where the vaccine is far worse
than the disease itself.

DW.