[XML-SIG] IPC7 results

[Jack Jansen]

SMIL is indeed one of the reasons I want namespaces. SMIL doesn't require 
namespaces (as someone suggested), but we definitely want them to be able to 
incorporate our cmif-specific features in a SMIL document.

And to answer Lars' question "why I don't use architectural forms": because 
I'm not familiar enough with them, I guess. Namespaces seem like a nice 
lightweight mechanism to allow easy reuse of standards.


What I would like to do (i.e. what I would like us, as python-xml sig to 
do:-), before we go off and implement namespaces in the various python modules 
is to determine how people would want to use namespaces and how this would be 
facilitated in the API. (Or, perhaps better, to find out how other groups such 
as the DOM people envision doing this).

I can think of a two ways in which I might want to treat unknown namespaces, 
and each would require a slightly different API in DOM (SAX probably isn't as 
much of a problem):
- Pretend that stuff in unrecognized namespaces isn't there at all,
- Treat stuff in unrecognized namespaces as opaque (i.e. leave it in the tree,
  but during transforms and such treat it as you would PCDATA)

For known namespaces there are again various issues. I might want to treat one 
of the namespaces as "primary", where the tag/element names would be simple 
strings (backward compatible) and names from other namespaces are returned as 
"ns:elemname" or ("ns", "elemname"). But, for other applications I might want 
the namespaces to be treated pretty much separately. And, of course, there are 
probably quite a few applications that are happy enough if we just treat ":" 
as part of the identifier... (half a :-)

--
Jack Jansen             | ++++ stop the execution of Mumia Abu-Jamal ++++
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http://www.cwi.nl/~jack | see http://www.xs4all.nl/~tank/spg-l/sigaction.htm