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[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] RE: Begging the Question
 Simon St. Laurent wrote, "I would humbly suggest that it might be reasonable at this point to put 'namespaces mean X because the namespaces spec says so' into the same category as [example of begging the question]. That would suggest that because the namespaces spec has been the subject of so much (unfulfilling) argument, it may be considered to have virtually no traction whatsoever on any but the most limited points - an attribute-based syntax for associating identifiers with prefixes which uses element structures to define its scope." I'm going to read this very literally. This statement would mean that "the namespaces spec says X" is false for all X, in other words, the spec does not say anything at all. That conflates the (true) recognition that the namespaces specification has suffered much misunderstanding with the (false) idea that it has no meaning whatsoever. Much of the fruitless debate has been caused by reading into the specification things that it does not say. If you strip away these projections, what remains is less than has been fantasized but still much more than nothing. It is an error to claim that the spec says more than it does. It is equally an error to claim, because it does not say what some would imagine or prefer that it say, that it says nothing. It says a limited amount. It is also an error to assert that the specification has no definite meaning if many people have misrepresented or misunderstood it. That confuses popularity with identity. If the specification is not well understood, I recommend that we have little to gain by arguing that it thereby does not say anything. We will gain more by investing our obviously abundant writing capacity into getting what it does say well understood and then moving on. 
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