PRD3 suggestion: sample instances with unconventional namespace prefixes

["G. Ken Holman" <gkholman@CraneSoftwrights.com>]

I gather there is a public perception that the UBL committee's 
*convention* of using namespace prefixes is somehow regarded as a 
*standard* way of prefixing element names mandated in UBL.

Of course this is not the case, but, sadly, this is the 
perception.  In XML any namespace can use any prefix, and at any 
point in an XML document one of the namespaces may be associated with 
no prefix (called the default namespace).

I feel this warrants supplementing our XML instance directory with 
the attached four XML-equivalent instances to the 
UBL-Invoice-2.0-Example.xml found in PRD1 and PRD2.  I say 
"XML-equivalent" because applications should be ignoring prefixes and 
using only the combination of namespace URI and local-name for each 
element, regardless of any different use of namespace prefixes.

These five instances have very different uses of namespace prefixes, 
but identical uses of URI/local-name combinations.  Every UBL 
application should treat all five documents as having the identical 
processed information to work on.  They all validate with the UBL schemas.

UBL-Invoice-2.0-Example.xml - (PRD1) document element in the default namespace
UBL-Invoice-2.0-Example-NS1.xml - no elements in the default namespace
UBL-Invoice-2.0-Example-NS2.xml - basics in the default namespace
UBL-Invoice-2.0-Example-NS3.xml - aggregates in the default namespace
UBL-Invoice-2.0-Example-NS4.xml - embedded and overloaded use of prefixes

I have the time to add these to PRD2 if Jon hasn't yet documented the 
revised set of sample instances, but I'm assuming we just put these in PRD3.

However, an argument for *not* including such instances is that it is 
not the role of the UBL specification to be tutorial in nature.  Yet 
I'm confident such examples will be very useful to UBL users when 
they can go to their application developers with a set of 
unconventional documents that are still UBL valid and found in the 
UBL distribution (thus giving them some legitimacy).  Their 
developers may think the users's applications are ready for the real 
world, but the real world has many and varied and bizarre ways that 
namespaces are used.

I would like to discuss this on this week's calls.

. . . . . . . . . . Ken

UBL-Invoice-2.0-Example-NS1.xml

UBL-Invoice-2.0-Example-NS3.xml

UBL-Invoice-2.0-Example-NS2.xml

UBL-Invoice-2.0-Example-NS4.xml

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