Hi Joe,

Thank you for your clarifications and suggestion.  I will definitely
look into using XPath/XSLT 2.0.  I was looking for a way of
incorporating a default namespace into XPath expressions and XSLT
transforms, but was surprised to discover that this concept hadn't been
addressed in the previous version.  It is definitely my preference to
have the capability of dealing with namespaces in my framework if this
can be done without making it harder to use for the 99% of the cases
where namespaces are irrelevant.

Thanks,
--Erik

Joe Kesselman wrote:
> erik_midtskogen@a... wrote:
> > Namespaces aren't normally used in html
>
> HTML is based on SGML, which doesn't have the concept of namespaces.
> XHTML is based on XML, which does.
>
> > could conceivably use namespaces in xhtml, but there would be no
> > practical purpose in doing so.
>
> That's absolutely incorrect. Namespaces are essential when XHTML is
> intermixed with other vocabularies -- MathML, SVG, and so on. That's
> becoming more common.
>
> For that reason, the XHTML elements themselves need to be in the correct
> namespace (http://www.w3c.org/TR/xhtml1, as you pointed out).
>
> Yes, it may not matter in your particular case. Or it may not matter
> _yet_, which I submit is likely to be a more accurate statement unless
> this is throw-away code.
>
> > But in this case, it's more important to me that users of
> > my framework be able to write XPath expressions into the configuration
> > files without having to specify the same namespace prefix in all their
> > location steps.
>
> Alternative suggestion: Use an XPath 2.0/XSLT 2.0 implementation, where
> the concept of default namespace is meaningful. That would let your
> users leave out prefixes yet still get results which are completely
> correct per the standards.
>
>
>
>
> --
> () ASCII Ribbon Campaign  | Joe Kesselman
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