namespaces.html 8.2 KB

1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344454647484950
  1. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
  2. <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
  3. <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1" /><link rel="SHORTCUT ICON" href="/favicon.ico" /><style type="text/css">
  4. TD {font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica}
  5. BODY {font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica; margin-top: 2em; margin-left: 0em; margin-right: 0em}
  6. H1 {font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica}
  7. H2 {font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica}
  8. H3 {font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica}
  9. A:link, A:visited, A:active { text-decoration: underline }
  10. </style><title>Namespaces</title></head><body bgcolor="#8b7765" text="#000000" link="#a06060" vlink="#000000"><table border="0" width="100%" cellpadding="5" cellspacing="0" align="center"><tr><td width="120"><a href="http://swpat.ffii.org/"><img src="epatents.png" alt="Action against software patents" /></a></td><td width="180"><a href="http://www.gnome.org/"><img src="gnome2.png" alt="Gnome2 Logo" /></a><a href="http://www.w3.org/Status"><img src="w3c.png" alt="W3C Logo" /></a><a href="http://www.redhat.com/"><img src="redhat.gif" alt="Red Hat Logo" /></a><div align="left"><a href="http://xmlsoft.org/"><img src="Libxml2-Logo-180x168.gif" alt="Made with Libxml2 Logo" /></a></div></td><td><table border="0" width="90%" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="0" align="center" bgcolor="#000000"><tr><td><table width="100%" border="0" cellspacing="1" cellpadding="3" bgcolor="#fffacd"><tr><td align="center"><h1>The XML C parser and toolkit of Gnome</h1><h2>Namespaces</h2></td></tr></table></td></tr></table></td></tr></table><table border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0" width="100%" align="center"><tr><td bgcolor="#8b7765"><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="2" width="100%"><tr><td valign="top" width="200" bgcolor="#8b7765"><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="1" width="100%" bgcolor="#000000"><tr><td><table width="100%" border="0" cellspacing="1" cellpadding="3"><tr><td colspan="1" bgcolor="#eecfa1" align="center"><center><b>Main Menu</b></center></td></tr><tr><td bgcolor="#fffacd"><form action="search.php" enctype="application/x-www-form-urlencoded" method="get"><input name="query" type="text" size="20" value="" /><input name="submit" type="submit" value="Search ..." /></form><ul><li><a href="index.html">Home</a></li><li><a href="html/index.html">Reference Manual</a></li><li><a href="intro.html">Introduction</a></li><li><a href="FAQ.html">FAQ</a></li><li><a href="docs.html" style="font-weight:bold">Developer Menu</a></li><li><a href="bugs.html">Reporting bugs and getting help</a></li><li><a href="help.html">How to help</a></li><li><a href="downloads.html">Downloads</a></li><li><a href="news.html">Releases</a></li><li><a href="XMLinfo.html">XML</a></li><li><a href="XSLT.html">XSLT</a></li><li><a href="xmldtd.html">Validation &amp; DTDs</a></li><li><a href="encoding.html">Encodings support</a></li><li><a href="catalog.html">Catalog support</a></li><li><a href="namespaces.html">Namespaces</a></li><li><a href="contribs.html">Contributions</a></li><li><a href="examples/index.html" style="font-weight:bold">Code Examples</a></li><li><a href="html/index.html" style="font-weight:bold">API Menu</a></li><li><a href="guidelines.html">XML Guidelines</a></li><li><a href="ChangeLog.html">Recent Changes</a></li></ul></td></tr></table><table width="100%" border="0" cellspacing="1" cellpadding="3"><tr><td colspan="1" bgcolor="#eecfa1" align="center"><center><b>Related links</b></center></td></tr><tr><td bgcolor="#fffacd"><ul><li><a href="http://mail.gnome.org/archives/xml/">Mail archive</a></li><li><a href="http://xmlsoft.org/XSLT/">XSLT libxslt</a></li><li><a href="http://phd.cs.unibo.it/gdome2/">DOM gdome2</a></li><li><a href="http://www.aleksey.com/xmlsec/">XML-DSig xmlsec</a></li><li><a href="ftp://xmlsoft.org/">FTP</a></li><li><a href="http://www.zlatkovic.com/projects/libxml/">Windows binaries</a></li><li><a href="http://opencsw.org/packages/libxml2">Solaris binaries</a></li><li><a href="http://www.explain.com.au/oss/libxml2xslt.html">MacOsX binaries</a></li><li><a href="http://codespeak.net/lxml/">lxml Python bindings</a></li><li><a href="http://cpan.uwinnipeg.ca/dist/XML-LibXML">Perl bindings</a></li><li><a href="http://libxmlplusplus.sourceforge.net/">C++ bindings</a></li><li><a href="http://www.zend.com/php5/articles/php5-xmlphp.php#Heading4">PHP bindings</a></li><li><a href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/libxml2-pas/">Pascal bindings</a></li><li><a href="http://libxml.rubyforge.org/">Ruby bindings</a></li><li><a href="http://tclxml.sourceforge.net/">Tcl bindings</a></li><li><a href="http://bugzilla.gnome.org/buglist.cgi?product=libxml2">Bug Tracker</a></li></ul></td></tr></table></td></tr></table></td><td valign="top" bgcolor="#8b7765"><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="1" width="100%"><tr><td><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="1" width="100%" bgcolor="#000000"><tr><td><table border="0" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="1" width="100%"><tr><td bgcolor="#fffacd"><p>The libxml2 library implements <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml-names/">XML namespaces</a> support by
  11. recognizing namespace constructs in the input, and does namespace lookup
  12. automatically when building the DOM tree. A namespace declaration is
  13. associated with an in-memory structure and all elements or attributes within
  14. that namespace point to it. Hence testing the namespace is a simple and fast
  15. equality operation at the user level.</p><p>I suggest that people using libxml2 use a namespace, and declare it in the
  16. root element of their document as the default namespace. Then they don't need
  17. to use the prefix in the content but we will have a basis for future semantic
  18. refinement and merging of data from different sources. This doesn't increase
  19. the size of the XML output significantly, but significantly increases its
  20. value in the long-term. Example:</p><pre>&lt;mydoc xmlns="http://mydoc.example.org/schemas/"&gt;
  21. &lt;elem1&gt;...&lt;/elem1&gt;
  22. &lt;elem2&gt;...&lt;/elem2&gt;
  23. &lt;/mydoc&gt;</pre><p>The namespace value has to be an absolute URL, but the URL doesn't have to
  24. point to any existing resource on the Web. It will bind all the element and
  25. attributes with that URL. I suggest to use an URL within a domain you
  26. control, and that the URL should contain some kind of version information if
  27. possible. For example, <code>"http://www.gnome.org/gnumeric/1.0/"</code> is a
  28. good namespace scheme.</p><p>Then when you load a file, make sure that a namespace carrying the
  29. version-independent prefix is installed on the root element of your document,
  30. and if the version information don't match something you know, warn the user
  31. and be liberal in what you accept as the input. Also do *not* try to base
  32. namespace checking on the prefix value. &lt;foo:text&gt; may be exactly the
  33. same as &lt;bar:text&gt; in another document. What really matters is the URI
  34. associated with the element or the attribute, not the prefix string (which is
  35. just a shortcut for the full URI). In libxml, element and attributes have an
  36. <code>ns</code> field pointing to an xmlNs structure detailing the namespace
  37. prefix and its URI.</p><p>@@Interfaces@@</p><pre>xmlNodePtr node;
  38. if(!strncmp(node-&gt;name,"mytag",5)
  39. &amp;&amp; node-&gt;ns
  40. &amp;&amp; !strcmp(node-&gt;ns-&gt;href,"http://www.mysite.com/myns/1.0")) {
  41. ...
  42. }</pre><p>Usually people object to using namespaces together with validity checking.
  43. I will try to make sure that using namespaces won't break validity checking,
  44. so even if you plan to use or currently are using validation I strongly
  45. suggest adding namespaces to your document. A default namespace scheme
  46. <code>xmlns="http://...."</code> should not break validity even on less
  47. flexible parsers. Using namespaces to mix and differentiate content coming
  48. from multiple DTDs will certainly break current validation schemes. To check
  49. such documents one needs to use schema-validation, which is supported in
  50. libxml2 as well. See <a href="http://www.relaxng.org/">relagx-ng</a> and <a href="http://www.w3c.org/XML/Schema">w3c-schema</a>.</p><p><a href="bugs.html">Daniel Veillard</a></p></td></tr></table></td></tr></table></td></tr></table></td></tr></table></td></tr></table></body></html>