[jdom-interest] Namespace issues, et al.

[Elliotte Rusty Harold]

At 1:43 PM -0800 2/23/03, Malachi de AElfweald wrote:
>So, you are saying that the example on the W3 page CAN NOT be
>validated, since the 'href' attribute wouldn't be considered
>part of the xhtml dtd?
>

No, we're not saying that at all. You think namespaces do a lot more 
and mean a lot more than they actually do. Thus you keep making 
assumptions that aren't true. Your latest is that namespaces have 
anything to do with validation. They don't. DTDs validate elements 
and attributes by name only, irrespective of what namespace those 
names are in. I know it's hard, but it's not you. The namespaces spec 
is poorly written. You've now stumbled into another hole lots of 
developers fall into, the intersection between namespaces and DTDs. 
The only way to make sense out of the namespaces spec is to be 
extremely careful to read only what it says, and do not read between 
the lines.

I strongly recommend you forget you ever read the namespace spec, and 
instead go read a good third-party exposition of this content as can 
be found in many intro XML books.
-- 

+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
| Elliotte Rusty Harold | elharo at metalab.unc.edu | Writer/Programmer |
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|           Processing XML with Java (Addison-Wesley, 2002)          |
|              http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/xmljava             |
| http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN%3D0201771861/cafeaulaitA  |
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