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[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: Question About Namespaces and DTDs
 At 07:38 PM 25/07/00 -0400, Simon St.Laurent wrote: >> What is more important is that the parties involved (ie the W3 gods, >>Working Group members, Namespaces Rec editors) understand that they did the >>wrong thing, and will try to not do it again. >> >>I think these people are aware of the problems with namespaces, but I don't >>know if they share my opinion of these problems as mistakes they've >>inflicted on us. > >I don't think they do, though sending them a bill for wasted time might >help make that clear. There are still people who'll claim that Namespaces >is _almost_ perfect, though I think they're declining in number lately. Well, I'm one of those people. Namespaces do a very good job of what they were designed to do - give elements and attributes globally unique names that allow software to recognize and differentiate. They have been implemented by pretty well every interesting piece of XML software in the world (hint: it's not hard) and in practice, in real-world implementations, just work. Yes, namespaces and DTDs don't get along very well. At the end of the day, the conclusion was that uniquifying names in a simple and clean way was an important enough piece of the puzzle that that was an acceptable cost. Although, to be honest, nobody foresaw how far into excessive overengineering schemas were going to veer... Anyhow, the notion that namespaces were foisted on a resisting populace by a small group of insiders is totally silly. There was tons of input and agonizing hand-wringing and meetings and emails and successive drafts etc etc ad nauseum. And in some parts of the spec, the community consensus was questionable. But the basic notion of using URIs to extend names and make them unique had overwhelming buy-in from almost everyone (except those who wanted to stay with architectural forms). Lots and lots of alternatives were considered. There's no requirement that you like the namespace system, and it's certainly possible that there was a better way to have done it that the community wasn't smart enough to cook up. But please drop this notion that there's consensus on the other side: that namespaces are broken in obvious ways and that these errors are avoidable in future. -Tim 
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