On Wed, 9 Mar 2005, Sebastian Rahtz wrote:

> David Sewell wrote:
>
> > So code meant to process
> > both types of documents will either have to use wildcarded namespaces
> > everywhere
> unless I am mistaken, the concept does not exist in XSLT

What I'm talking about is the prefix wildcarding available in XQuery and
XSLT 2.0 (via XPath 2.0); for example:

      //*:title

"select any element in the document with local name 'title', in any namespace
(including no namespace)".

> > Would it make any sense to retrofit the official P4 DTDs with the
> > namespace, i.e.
> >
> >        <!ATTLIST TEI.2
> >        xmlns CDATA #FIXED "http://www.tei-c.org/ns/1.0"  [etc.] >
> >
> It seems to me that this would be HIGHLY misleading.
> The whole point of the namespace "http://www.tei-c.org/ns/1.0"
> is that it identifies the markup language  known to mankind
> as P5. Labelling the markup language known to mankind as P4
> with the namespace is deceitful, and comparable to stealing
> sheep (sorry, I am in a conference full of typesetters).

Point taken. And based on everyone's response, a reasonable
strategy for dealing with a heterogenous collection of P4/P5 documents
might be:

1. If low-level interoperability isn't needed (e.g. you just want to
   search on common elements), deal with different namespaces via
   explicitly coding them or using wildcarding as above
2. If low-level interoperability is needed (e.g. documents must all
   display using the same stylesheet), convert P4 -> P5.

DS

--
David Sewell, Editorial and Technical Manager
Electronic Imprint, The University of Virginia Press
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