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Notes on imports and includes

2000-04-21
2000-05-04
  • Curt Arnold

    Curt Arnold - 2000-04-21

    Namespace prefix definitions (xmlns:prefix="uri" attributes) are not
    accessible from XSLT (and probably from anything else that tries to hide the
    details of namespacing from you) which means that it is not possible to
    resolve qualifed name references to types, for example, in those
    environments.  I'd suggest adding an explicit schemaPrefix attribute to the
    import and targetPrefix attribute to the schema element.  At least, this
    information could be used as decoration in the documentation.  I am able to
    work around this using equivalent attributes from another namespace, but it
    seems like a general problem.

    Of course, any implementation has to have some limit on the depth of nested
    includes.

    A complicated issue is nested imports.  It should be moderately common for
    multiple imports to in turn import some common namespace but possibly from
    different resources.  Trying to resolve the potential conflicts seemed
    untenable.

    How I've currently addressed it in my preprocessor is that only imports that
    in the schema being compiled add information to the validation package.  If
    an import appears in an include or import and its namespace didn't have an
    import in the schema being compiled, an informative message is issued (but
    which might result in some unsatisfied references).

     
    • Curt Arnold

      Curt Arnold - 2000-05-04

      Apparently, namespace prefixes are available from XSLT in the deceptively named namespace nodes.  Thanks to James Clark for my enlightenment.  My working version (later than 0.0.1) no longer requires xsc:prefix attributes.

       

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