Last modified: 2010-08-13 21:02:18 UTC
It would be useful to define an XML namespace for thze XML dump format. This would allow us to embed elements from that output in other XML documents easily. There is already an XML schema defined for this output, adding a namespace would be trivial. It could even use the same URI: http://www.mediawiki.org/xml/export-0.4 In practice, this would mean that the top level <mediawiki> tag returned by the exporter would become: <mediawiki xmlns="http://www.mediawiki.org/xml/export-0.4" xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.mediawiki.org/xml/export-0.4/ http://www.mediawiki.org/xml/export-0.4.xsd" version="0.4" xml:lang="de"> This should have no impact whatsoever on backward compatibility, except perhaps for programs processing the XML using naive regular expressions. I believe it would be ok to break those, since they rely on things that are never guaranteed in XML.
actually, if i understand xsi:schemaLocation correctly, it already sais that <http://www.mediawiki.org/xml/export-0.4.xsd> is the schema for namespace <http://www.mediawiki.org/xml/export-0.4/>. However, as far as I know, the namespace would still need to be applied to the present XML document explicitly, using an xmlns attribute.
Umm, the dumps I'm looking at have http://www.mediawiki.org/xml/export-0.4 as their namespace... (I looked at both special:export output, and chwikibooks dumps)
Ahhhh! Firefoxes pretty XML formatting thingy hides the namespace attributes! ugh. closing as invalid. sorry folks :)
