Rick Jelliffe wrote:
In Schematron, I maintain a sharp distinction between the schema language
in XML (which uses XML's namespace declarations) and the query
language (usually XSLT expressions and XPaths). A specific element
is provided to allow prefixes within the queries to be interpreted.
For example
<schema xmlns="http://www.ascc.net/xml/schematron";>
<title>Example</title>
<ns prefix="x" http://www.eg.org/x />
Without adderssing the rest of your points, this kind of practice is
exactly the kind of thing that I would have vastly preferred orginally,
as opposed to the current practice of letting specification writers
assume access to in-scope namespace prefix bindings.
Having said that, the assumption (that you can rely on access to schema
bindings) has now become sufficiently widespread that it may actually be
harmful to introduce new methods of establishing the binding, as
schematron does. -Tim
