Re: Namespaces

Christian Egli wrote:

> lenya.org?

see below.

> Why don't you come up with a little RFC?
> 
> It's all fine to come up with a standard describing how we ought to do
> it. But acyualy updating all existing publications to this scheme is a
> non-trivial amount of work.

OK, this is true.

> That's why I'd like to see some outline how or if we are going to move
> existing publications to this new standard. If we decide not to move
> them that's ok and should also be noted.

2. Abstract

The goal of this proposal is to use XML namespaces whenever this
seems useful, especially for documents that
- occur in the same processing context as other documents
- are processed by XSLT stylesheets

4. Specification

The Lenya developers define a common base URI for all namespaces
that are specifically created for the Lenya CMS.
A documentation page is created where all namespaces are listed.


5. Motivation

"[...] documents, containing multiple markup vocabularies, pose problems 
of recognition and collision. Software modules need to be able to 
recognize the tags and attributes which they are designed to process, 
even in the face of "collisions" occurring when markup intended for some 
other software package uses the same element type or attribute name. [...]"
(http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml-names/)

Namespaces help to
- recognize the context / purpose of XML documents or fragments
- trace processing problems
- combine documents from different contexts

6. Rationale

I would suggest using an HTTP URI as the base URI with an HTML
page (maybe redirecting to the Lenya namespaces list).

7. Backwards Compatibility

In most cases documents will be not backwards compatible.
I would suggest to use namespaces from now on for all
newly invented document types.

For every existing document type, it must be evaluated if it
is worth introducing a namespace.

8. Reference Implementation

There is no reference implementation yet.

Andreas