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Re: repercussions

• To: xml-dev@l...
• Subject: Re: repercussions
• From: Eric van der Vlist <vdv@d...>
• Date: Fri, 19 Dec 2003 19:52:27 +0100
• In-reply-to: <EB32BC7F-3248-11D8-B46E-000A95A51C9E@t...>
• Organization: Dyomedea (http://dyomedea.com)
• References: <r02000200-1028-35D5234E323E11D8AE870003937A08C2@[192.168.124.11]> <EB32BC7F-3248-11D8-B46E-000A95A51C9E@t...>

On Fri, 2003-12-19 at 18:29, Tim Bray wrote:
> On Dec 19, 2003, at 8:12 AM, Simon St.Laurent wrote:
> 
> > He also points to a nice analogy from Mark Nottingham:
> >
> > http://www.mnot.net/blog/2003/12/06/qnames_are_evil
> >
> > It's good to confirm that issues derided as mere aesthetic blotches are
> > capable of causing real problems for sophisticated tools - and users.
> 
> It is now crystal-clear that allowing qnames to escape from element & 
> attribute names into content was a terrible mistake that we're now 
> stuck with forever.  I struggled against this idea but lost.  -Tim

We can still try to avoid that they spread out into new vocabularies.

I have done my best to limit their impact within RELAX NG and I think we
should continue to bark each time they are considered in a new
vocabulary.

The last I came on was in "new syntaxes for RDF"

http://www.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/discovery/2003/11/new-syntaxes-rdf/paper.html

That includes in its XML syntax requirements: "Be a ``modern'' XML
syntax - such as using XML QNames in attribute values".

Maybe we should also be clear about what's wrong about using QNames.

For me, it's not that much the use a prefixes which is wrong but the
fact that they rely on a definition which is part of the markup. 

In other words, I think that this is wrong:

<foo xmlns:bar="http://example.com/bar">bar:baz</foo>

But if an application wants to allow things such as:

<foo prfx="bar http://example.com/bar">bar:baz</foo>

I don't see any reason to object. That may not be optimal, but that
doesn't violate any hard rule.

Eric
-- 
Curious about Relax NG? Read my upcoming book online.
                                   http://books.xmlschemata.org/relaxng/
Upcoming XML schema languages tutorial:
 - Santa Clara  -half day- (15/03/2004)        http://masl.to/?J24916E96
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Eric van der Vlist       http://xmlfr.org            http://dyomedea.com
(W3C) XML Schema ISBN:0-596-00252-1 http://oreilly.com/catalog/xmlschema
------------------------------------------------------------------------

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    • From: james anderson <james.anderson@s...>

• References:
  • repercussions
    • From: "Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@s...>
  • Re: repercussions
    • From: Tim Bray <tbray@t...>

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