[Zope] Newbie namespace question

[J. Cameron Cooper]

Jeffrey Blaze wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
>             My question is really about HTML.  I am implementing an open 
> source defect tracking system called Roundup (a set of Python modules), 
> and noticed that it uses TAL.  However, I looked all through the Roundup 
> and Python HTML and did not find a namespace declaration.  Isn’t one 
> required?  This from 
> (http://www.zope.org/Documentation/Books/ZopeBook/2_6Edition/AppendixC.stx):
> 
>  
> 
> The prefix identifies the language, and must be introduced by an XML 
> namespace declaration in XML and XHTML documents, like this:
> 
>      xmlns:ns="http://language.creator.com/namespaces/MyAttributeLanguage
> 
>  
> 
> I realize that the statement above mentions XHTML but not HTML, implying 
> that non-well-formed HTML does not require the declaration.  But in the 
> absence of the declaration, how does HTML know how to handle a TAL 
> statement attribute?  Why wouldn’t it balk as soon as it sees the tal: 
> prefix?

The TAL parser apparently isn't picky about having TAL namespaces 
defined in HTML. From that same page:

  Zope does not require an XML namespace declaration when creating 
templates with a content-type of text/html. However, it does require an 
XML namespace declaration for all other content-types.

I would gather that it happily assumes that, in HTML (which doesn't 
parse nicely anyway), anything starting with 'tal:' or 'metal:' is a TAL 
or METAL attribute. And since they are all parsed and removed by the 
time the page is rendered it doesn't matter to the consumer of the page, 
either.

		--jcc