Re: Internet-Draft: Media Feature - xmlns

On Wed, 2002-01-23 at 22:14, Ian Graham wrote:
> My only suggestion, for what it's worth, would be to allow for the
> declaration (and please don't overinterpret that word ;-) ) of the 'root'
> namespace for a document.  That seems a reasonable distinction to make,
> although you'd then have to define how such a statement interacts with
> content-type declarations such as application/xml+mathml (would that, in
> some twisted way, imply a default 'root'-level namespace, and if so,
> how?).

Personally, I believe that the root namespace is not a definitive guide
to the contents of the document.  The XSLT case is prominent, but there
are other cases where the root namespace has a tenuous connection or no
connection to the content's processing.  Other mechanisms for
establishing the MIME Media Type seem to be more effective in these
cases, especially for the XSLT case.

On the other hand, I wouldn't heartily oppose a registration of
"rootxmlns" or somesuch.  I suspect it rates a separate registration
document, however, as the issues it raises are both more substantive
than (potential conflict with Media Type) and different from the issues
raised by a simple list of namespace URIs.

-- 
Simon St.Laurent
Ring around the content, a pocket full of brackets
Errors, errors, all fall down!
http://simonstl.com