Last week I discussed the fact that “namespace hygiene” — the use of XML namespaces — would cause a simple Laszlo program such as this one:

<canvas>
  <include href="button.lzx"></include>
  <button>Click <b>me</b></button>
</canvas>

to balloon to the following mixture of namespace declarations and namespace prefixes:

<canvas xmlns:xi="http://www.w3.org/2003/XInclude" xmlns="http://www.laszlosystems.com/2003/05/lzx" xmlns:xhtml="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
  <xi:include href="mytext.lzx"></xi:include>
  <mybutton>Click <xhtml:b>me</xhtml:b></mybutton>
</canvas>

This namespace explosion isn’t a problem for the server-side Java engineer or the XML-savvy processing pipeline plumber. XML is moving in this direction, and the preceding document isn’t overly heavy on punctuation compared to the typical XSLT source file, Jelly file, or JSP file that uses tag libraries.

It is a problem for a number of OO, GUI, and DHTML developers that should also be able to use LZX. The concepts associated with LZX aren’t that difficult, and don’t have anything to do with the hard problems in document integration that XML Namespaces are intended to resolve.

I also believe that the extra verbosity slows the speed of even expert developes, because it gets in the way of simple examples, in documentation and pedagogy, and exploratory programming and unit testing during development. I suspect that this is a contentious statement, because it comes down to a difference in development styles that is masquerading as a religious issue. I would like to discuss this later, but not today.

For now I’d like to assume there’s some merit to making programs that are written in XML look more like the first example above than the second one, and explore whether this can be done in a well-defined way.

Namespaces reviewed

A namespace is a map from names (string literals or “symbols”) to something else. The something else might be a variable, value cell, type, class, or just a longer name (which might name one of these). If a name can mean two different things in two different contexts, then namespaces are involved.

An example from the C programming language is the difference between struct names and variable names. A struct can be named date, and this is completely independent of whether a variable is also named date. An example from Java is the package. The java.lang.awt.List class is unrelated to the java.util.List interface, because one is in the java.awt package, and the other is in java.util.

Each interface and class in Java defines a namespace. Two classes A and B, that are unrelated by class inheritance, can define a field named x. A.x is unrelated to B.x: the two fields can have different types and viabilities.

In fact, a Java class definition defines more than one namespace. One namespace is the namespace of fields of that class. Another is the namespace of class methods. A Java class A can therefore define both a field named A.year, and a method named A.year. This is in contrast to Python, where a method is a particular kind of attribute (the Python name for “field”) — fields and methods belong to the same namespace. (This also illustrates the difference between the space of names and the space of referents for those names. If B extends A, then the years in A.year and B.year are in different namespaces, but refer to the same method or field.)

Namespaces in programming languages solve two problems. One is the tendency to run out of meaningful identifiers within a package controlled by a single owner. The other is the problem of packages controlled by multiple owners. (“Owner” here simply means someone with authority to modify the names used within the package. If you’re able to modify all the source code you use, the second problem reduces to the first one.) Namespaces address these problems by doing away with the one-to-one correspondence between the spelling of the name and its referent. The correspondence between the name and the named entity is now a function of the context of the name, as well as its spelling.

Namespace selection

Given multiple namespaces, what rules are used to determine which namespace is used for a given occurrence of a name? There are two main methods of namespace selection, or name resolution.

First, the namespace may be a function of its syntactic type. For example, in Java, methods and fields are in different namespaces, as we saw above. In XML, tag names and attribute names are in different namespaces. Lisp dialects are famously divided into Lisp 1 and Lisp 2 dialects, depending on whether variables and functions share a namespace. This method of namespace resolution is used when there’s a small number of implicitly defined namespaces, as in the difference between methods and fields, or the namespaces that a class definition introduces.

The second method of namespace resolution is explicit: Each namespace has a name, and the program language has syntax for specifying the namespaces that are used in different contexts. Java and Python use the import statement for this. XML uses the xmlns and xmlns:* attributes.

(Note that if namespaces are named, as in the second method, there still has to be a way to resolve the referent of a namespace — there has to be a namespace of names, as it were. Often this bottoms out in a load path or other list of linked libraries. For example, the resolution of java.util.List into an interface is defined by the classes on the CLASSPATH.)

Programming languages that use import generally have two styles for specifying what is imported, and two styles for specifying how the imported name is named:

Literal and wildcard imports

Consider the difference between the following two Java statements:

import java.util.List;

import java.util.*;

The first line makes List available as a name for java.util.List. The second line does this too, but makes any other class and interface names in java.util available, without the preceding java.util., as well.

This corresponds to the distinction between the Python statements:

from java.util import List

from java.util import *

and also between the Haskell statements:

import Prelude

import Prelude {List}

The point of the multiple examples being that this is a pretty widely accepted design for namespaces, not just an accident of Java.

(Python differs from Java and Haskell in that (1) in Python, a namespace is a runtime object, and (2) import is defined to modify an existing namespace at runtime. Also in Python, like XML and unlike Java and Haskell, the scope of an import can be smaller than the entirety of a source file. These are three of many other differences among the way name lookup happens in different languages, that I’m ignoring here.)

Unqualified and qualified names

A qualifier is a string that is attached to the name (usually by prefixing it), at the point where the name is used. For instance, List is an unqualified name; java.util.List is a qualified name: it is the simple name List, prefixed by the string java.util. to indicate that it names the List interface in the java.util package.

Java always allows qualified names. java.util.List is valid as an interface name regardless of whether an import statement for java.util or java.util.List exists. The import statement, in Java, is only for the purpose of allowing unqualified names as well: in the presence of import java.util.List or import java.util.*, List and java.util.List are synonymous.

Python and Haskell require an import statement in order to use a name defined in a different code unit. Consider the difference between the Python statements:

import java.util.List
from java.util import List

The first introduces java.util.List (but not List). The second introduces List (but not java.util.List). It is perfectly legal to include both statements in a source file. In this case, List and java.util.List will refer to the same value.

Rounding out the example set, Haskell allows this same distinction:

import qualified Prelude
import qualified Prelude {List}

Note that the distinction between qualified and unqualified imports is orthogonal to the distinction literal and wildcard imports:

import java.util.List      # Qualified literal
from java.util import List # Unqualified literal
import java.util.*         # Qualified wildcard
from java.util import *    # Unqualified wildcard

Conflict resolution

What happens when both java.util.List and java.awt.List are imported? (As unqualified imports, otherwise there isn’t any problem.) There are a number of logical possibilities, but there are three that I’ve seen used:

  • It’s a compile-time error, whether or not List is ever used. The Common Lisp package system used this. It was incredibly painful.

  • It’s a compile-time error if List is used; otherwise it’s legal. C++ and Java use this policy. It seems to work well.

  • One takes precedence. Python uses this policy. It sounds like it would be a potential source of errors, but it seems to work in practice.

Where does XML fit in

XML Namespaces allow both qualified and unqualified names. xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" defines a namespace that is used by unqualified tag names such as h1. xmlns:xhtml="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" defines a namespace that is used by names such as xhtml:h1 that are qualified by the prefix xhtml:.

XML is like Python in that a namespace must be declared to be used. In the absence of an xmlns or xmlns:xhtml attribute, it is impossible to use the h1 tag from the http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml namespace. {http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml}h1 is often used in XML written material to refer to this tag, but this is an abbreviation for h1 or xhtml:h1. In a context that contains an xmlns attribute. It’s not valid XML.

XML differs from the programming languages I discussed in one important way: In any given context, only names from one namespace may be used without qualification. Unlike Java, Python, Haskell, C++, Common Lisp, and every other language I know that has explicit namespaces at all, in XML, you can’t mix and match names from n different namespaces unless you prefix n-1 of them at each point that they’re used.

For example, In Java you can import both List from the java.util package and FastArrayList from the org.apache.commons.collections, and use both List and FastArrayList without qualifiers. (This is handy because FastArrayList implements the List interface.)

import java.util.List;
import org.apache.commons.collections.FastArrayList;
...
  List children = new FastArrayList();

In XML, you can choose one namespace or the other to use without qualification, but not both — even if the two namespaces don’t define any tags with the same names. This is the same as the conflict resolution rule I found unwieldy in Common Lisp, but worse — it’s not only an error if the two namespaces share a name, it’s an error just to import them both unqualified at all!

If Java did this, you would have to choose between writing:

List children = new FastArrayList();
java.util.List children = new org.apache.commons.collections.FastArrayList();
java.util.List children = new org.apache.commons.collections.FastArrayList();

I think there’s a reason that none of C++, Java, Python, and Haskell confines you to this choice.

Is there a way out?

In my next post I’ll propose a way to make XML look more like a programming language in its use of namespaces, discuss where it’s appropriate to do this (there are plenty of places XML Namespaces are used today where my proposal wouldn’t be appropriate), and give a proof of concept, in XSLT, that this can be done with a well-defined semantics.