JUMBO 9801

Namespace Experiment

The W3C has hinted (in the XML spec) that namespaces may be part of the future of XML, and allows that there may be experiments using the colon in Names. [There is a private W3C document which cannot be discussed here and which has not been used in the creation of what follows.] Everything in this section is taken from public domain examples of possible namespace mechanisms. It is highly likely that this current JUMBO experiment will be rendered obsolete at any moment; at that stage I will try to track whatever emerges publicly.

The probable givens are:

<?xml:namespace href="foo/schema.baz" as="FOO"?>
might be a way of providing a namespace The syntax and semantics or both the name and the contents of the value of the href attribute are deliberately undefined.

JUMBO's experiment, therefore, is to use XML as the syntax of the namespace file. This normally corresponds to a package. Thus <CML:MOL> is mapped onto the namespace file jumbo/cml/schema.xml and all classes for CML belong to the package jumbo.cml. The schema file (not described here) maps <CML:MOL> onto jumbo.cml.MOLNode. There is no need for a 1:1 mapping; thus for HTML TT and EM both map onto jumbo.sgml.html.TextNode.  JUMBO uses a horrible kludge where documents belong to a single namespace and where the original document is not colonized.

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Copyright Peter Murray-Rust, 1998