Re: cannot find the namespace declarations from an extension function

Michael Ludwig wrote:
>> Hmmm... It appears that the parser completely ignores all 'xmlns'
>> attributes. The interesting thing is that it reads attributes from
>> other non-null namespaces.
> 
> The xmlns may look like an attribute, but it really isn't. It's a
> namespace declaration, which happens to use attribute syntax. 

I tried to find something in the specs... All I found is:
http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml/#sec-common-syn

Note:

The Namespaces in XML Recommendation [XML Names] assigns a meaning to 
names containing colon characters. Therefore, authors should not use the 
colon in XML names except for namespace purposes, but XML processors 
*must* *accept* the colon as a name character.

According to this note, anything like foo:goo, xyz:abc, xmlns:123 must 
be threated by XML parsers as names for elements/attributes. If the 
parser is namespace aware then it should assign a special meaning to 
names with colons inside.

Searching the specs deeper, I found:
http://www.w3.org/TR/xml-names/#ns-decl

[Definition: A namespace (or more precisely, a namespace binding) is 
declared using a family of reserved attributes. Such an attribute's name 
must either be xmlns or begin xmlns:. ...]

Hence a namespace declaration is an attribute with special meaning, but 
still just an attribute.

> That's why it doesn't show up among the attributes, neither in DOM nor in XDM
> (XPath Data Model).
> 

The Xerces DOM parser recognizes xmlns: prefixed attributes as 
attributes. The problem was with the DTM parser used by Xalan.

Thanks for the feedback.


> Michael Ludwig
>