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Re: Begging the Question

• From: Sam Hunting <sam_hunting@y...>
• To: Sean McGrath <sean@d...>, xml-dev@l...
• Date: Sat, 30 Dec 2000 10:32:40 -0800 (PST)

Well, it's good to see XML-DEV ringing in the New Year with (ka-boom)
Yet Another Namespace Thread.... Plus ca change...

[sean mcgrath]

> As I have said before, perhaps it plays into
> the hands of those who know that the real "lock in" lies
> in the semantics which now, in the full glare of standards
> compliance, they can make proprietary.

This is interesting. It would explain two things about the W3C
Namespaces that I've always wondered about (correct me if I'm wrong,
namespace gurus)--

(1) Lack of synonyms -- there's no way to assert, for a single element
(whoops, almost wrote generic identifier) that it belongs to more than
one namespace.

(2) Colonized syntax -- if attribute syntax had been adopted,
information owners would have been able to attach/detach namespaces at
will through defaulting mechanisms, instead of crudding up their
instances with them.

Of course, these are two good ways to avoid lock-in, so perhaps in
retrospect it's not surprising that they weren't adopted.

S.



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