June 21, 2000 - XML Namespaces | WebReference

June 21, 2000 - XML Namespaces

Yehuda Shiran June 21, 2000
XML Namespaces
Tips: June 2000

Yehuda Shiran, Ph.D.
Doc JavaScript

Internet Explorer's support for custom tags on an HTML page requires that a namespace be defined for the tag. Custom tags definition is based on XML syntax and the namespace is an XML namespace. Let's see an example for a custom tag:

<HTML XMLNLOR="#000066"><HTML XMLNS:DOCJS>
<HEAD>
<STYLE>
  @media all {
    DOCJS\:RIGHT {text-align:right; width:100}
  }
</STYLE>
</HEAD>
<BODY>
<DOCJS:RIGHT>
 Read Doc JavaScript's columns, tips, tools, and tutorials
</DOCJS:RIGHT>
</BODY>
</HTML>

As shown above, the namespace we use is DOCJS:

<HTML XMLNS:DOCJS>

XMLNS stands for XML NameSpace. We defined a custom tag called RIGHT. Every use of this tag should be prefixed by the appropriate XML namespace, to create the new tag DOCJS:RIGHT. If namespaces are not defined, the custom tag is treated as an unknown tag when the document is parsed. Although navigating to a page with an unknown tag does not result in an error, the new custom tag is not able to contain other tags, nor can behaviors be applied to it. It is also possible to define multiple namespaces on a single HTML tag:

<HTML XMLNS:DOCJS XMLNS:DOCJAVASCRIPT>