Home | Business News | Browse by Publication | X | XML Journal

Shedding a little light on XML: is your XML processor psychic? (q&a).

Article Excerpt
I got an e-mail the other day from Miss Cleo. It was quite exciting. She said she had a dream about me and that I needed to call her (or one of her psychic friends) to find out some important information about my future. Wow! I thought. So I ran to the phone.

We chatted for some time and I found out my girlfriend was cheating on me. How did she know? Those psychics amaze me. While I was moving out I thought how much this relates to XML namespaces.

XML, as you know, allows us to work with XML documents that have many different vocabularies. Elements and attributes may have identical names from different document models in a single XML document. Unless your XML processor has psychic abilities, it will need some additional information to distinguish between these elements and attributes and to understand their meaning correctly. This is where namespaces come into play.

Although the namespace recommendation has made this task easier for us, there are still a few areas of confusion. This month's column covers -- and sheds a little light on -- some of the very common questions on namespaces.

Q: Why do namespaces use a URL naming convention if they don't reference a Web site?

A: The Web has enjoyed the success of utilizing a naming convention that allows for unique file names regardless of the enormous number of files on the Internet. It's amazing if you think about it, yet...

View this article FREE - Now for a Limited Time, try Goliath Business News
Free for 3 Days!