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2 points by evanrmurphy 5011 days ago | link | parent

> I thought the "x:a" was just an abbreviation for things like "w/html:a", "html:a", "tohtml:a", and "sml:a", substituting whatever you decided the macro name would be.

The "x:a" originally came from the example at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SXML#Example, where I think it had another meaning - maybe something to do with XHTML... anyway, it's probably not important. You clarified that I wasn't missing something in the conversation (unless we both are ;).



2 points by shader 5011 days ago | link

I think in the x:a syntax, the x part is supposed to denote the xml namespace in which the tag is defined. It's used in things like xpath.

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1 point by rocketnia 5010 days ago | link

I think so too. The x is defined here at the beginning of the example:

  (*TOP* (@ (*NAMESPACES* (x "http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml")))
   ...
There's an okay introduction to namespace usage in XML and SXML here: http://www196.pair.com/lisovsky/xml/ns/

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