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
-
that a colonized elementType of the form: <FOO:BAR>
maps this elementType into the FOO 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.
Back to JUMBO index
Copyright Peter Murray-Rust, 1998