Re: [Sax-devel] Re: SAX survey: expected local name for non-namespace qualified elements

[Arnaud Le H. <le...@us...>]

David Brownell wrote:

>>>And
>>>moreover, I'd certainly _prefer_ that elements not in any namespace
>>>still have a localName (regardless of the namespace setting)
>>>
>>
>>What is the localName in "foo:bar" and "foo:bar:foo" which are legal
>>element names in XML 1.0 and should therefore be passed through when
>>namespaces are off?
>>
> 
> I'd expect that localName would still be defined to be the syntactic
> "strip off the only prefix" transform of qName that it is in other
> cases ... so "foo:bar" would become "bar", and "foo:bar:foo" would
> be an error (normally reported as an empty localName).


I guess you could argue this makes sense. But it's not what I would 
expect and others argue that the localName should be the same as the 
qName in this case. Others may argue for something else yet.

What this proves to me is that people don't agree. And there is no way 
to say who's right who's wrong because there is no definition to refer 
to. The fact is that the notions of local name, prefix, and qualified 
name are only defined in the context of Namespaces. Once you're out of 
this context they therefore don't mean anything.

This is why I think it is best to leave them alone (i.e., having them be 
null) when namespaces processing is off.
-- 
Arnaud  Le Hors - IBM, XML Standards Strategy Group / W3C AC Rep.