[relax-ng-comment] How to avoid pattern name conflicts acrossdifferent vocabularies?

[Masayasu Ishikawa <mimasa@w3.org>]

Hello,

Now I'm experimenting to rewrite XHTML+MathML+SVG [1] in RELAX NG.
Rewriting each vocabulary is rather trivial (thanks to DTDinst), but
I have encountered some problems to combine them together.

Each vocabulary is defined in a separate schema, and they work fine
so long as they are used separately.  There is also a "hub" schema
that combines these vocabularies together by including them [2], but
there are conflicting definitions in those included schemas so it
doesn't work.  For example, both XHTML and SVG schemas have definition
like this:

  <define name="a">
    ...
    <element name="a">
      ...
    </element>
    ...
  </define>

and those are similar but different, and of course those belong to
different namespace.  I know this is an error according to the spec [3],
and if I have control over all schemas I can try to avoid name conflicts
just like avoiding name conflicts of parameter entities in DTDs (e.g.
name them as "XHTML.a" and "SVG.a" respectively), but when I don't
have control over each vocabulary, it's difficult to avoid such conflict.
In some cases I could work-around this by using the "combine" attribute,
but I don't think it's appropriate for all cases.  Is there any way to
avoid this kind of conflict?

As a side note, I think this is where RELAX Namespace would be useful.
I heard a rumor that RELAX Namespace will be updated to accommodate
RELAX NG.  Is there any progress?

Thanks,

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/XHTMLplusMathMLplusSVG/
[2] http://www.w3.org/People/mimasa/test/schemas/rng/xhtml-math-svg.rng
[3] http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/relax-ng/spec-20011203.html#IDA0KZR

-- 
Masayasu Ishikawa