Re: elements in a namespace

[Francis Norton <francis@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Mike,

This was very educational - thanks. You've corrected something I had not
only misunderstood but just posted to this newgroup as an answer...

Mike Brown wrote:
> 
> Steve Dahl was quite helpful. Here is a summary of what he told me in
> private email. Hopefully my interpretation is correct:
> 
> 1. Once a namespace is defined for an element, you must identify that
> element by the combination of its namespace prefix and the element name;
> simply referring to the element name by itself means "element with this name
> and with no namespace".
> 
> Example:
> If element <Department> contains <Employee> contains <FirstName>, and all
> are in the namespace assigned to prefix "mine", a variable could be bound to
> the value of the content of <FirstName> like this:
> 
> <xsl:variable name="Some_First_Name"
> expr="/mine:Department/mine:Employee/mine:FirstName"/>
> 
> 2. There's no way to define a default namespace to make the above any
> easier.

In the stylesheet, "Expression evaluation occurs with respect to a
context, which consists of: [...] the set of namespace declarations in
scope for the expression" but "the default namespace (as declared by
xmlns) is not part of this set"(see
http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/WD-xslt-19990421#expressions): in other words,
the spec says XSLT expressions can use namespace prefixes in the normal
way but not namespace defaults. So the example I just posted (using a
namespace default in the stylesheet) may work in XT but appears to be
incorrect.

> 
> 3. The binding of an element to a namespace doesn't affect its attributes.
> Attributes only need to be referenced with a prefix if they are specifically
> bound to a namespace themselves. Example:
> 
> <!-- attribute 'src' of element <img>, where <img>
>      is in namespace bound to prefix 'xhtml' -->
> <value-of select="xhtml:img/@src"/>
> 
> <!-- same, but with 'src' in namespace bound to prefix
>      'myAttributes' -->
> <value-of select="xhtml:img/@myAttributes:src"/>
> 
The namespaces rec says "Note that default namespaces do not apply
directly to attributes." So source attributes get processed in the same
way as XSLT expression attributes. Simpler...

Francis.
-- 
Francis Norton.

Air Rage - a "flight *and* fight" reaction?


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