[XML-SIG] Default namespaces, attributes, 4DOM and the W3C recommendation

[paul@boddie.net]

Sorry about replying to my own posting but, after sending it just before 
leaving work yesterday, I realised that I should have found a more general 
forum and done some research there. It might, however, be interesting to others 
to post what I found, but I apologise for being somewhat off-topic.

I managed to search some archives of the xml-dev@lists.xml.org mailing list 
(having thought that I might find some information on the W3C site, but didn't) 
and found a discussion which focuses on some examples which are almost 
identical in nature to the ones I provided. Here's a link to it:

  http://lists.xml.org/archives/xml-dev/200007/msg00505.html

One of the more informative explanations appears in the following message:

  http://lists.xml.org/archives/xml-dev/200007/msg00638.html

But, back to vague relevance for this list, does anyone have any hands-on 
experience with namespace processing along these lines? Might there be any 
plans in the PyXML world to possibly provide "helper methods" to find the 
meaning of attributes where such a meaning is inferred from the namespace of 
the parent element? Finally, is it reasonable to infer "meaning" in such a way? 
Are there any other likely interpretations for attributes without namespace 
prefixes?

The reason for all these questions is that I really want to find out the 
definitive method of handling such issues in my XMLForms project:

  http://www.paul.boddie.net/Python/XMLForms/index.html

Right now, I have to mandate that the XMLForms namespace be the default 
namespace in a document, because the above issue made it unclear how one should 
properly handle cases such as those I gave in my examples. It would be great, 
for a number of reasons, to remove this restriction.

Paul

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