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Re: Partyin' like it's 1999

• To: xml-dev@l...
• Subject: Re: Partyin' like it's 1999
• From: Alessandro Triglia <sandro@m...>
• Date: Wed, 27 Oct 2004 15:46:02 +0200 (CEST)

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Michael Kay [mailto:michael.h.kay@n...] 
> Sent: Wednesday, October 27, 2004 06:33
> To: 'Alessandro Triglia'; 'Hunsberger, Peter'; 'Bullard, 
> Claude L (Len)'; 'Michael Champion'
> Cc: xml-dev@l...
> Subject: RE:  Partyin' like it's 1999
> 
> 
> > When people complain about namespaces, do they mean that 
> > namespaces should
> > not exist at all?  Do they think they are useless?  Or do 
> > they think they
> > should be replaced by something else?  Or do they have in 
> > mind some simple
> > changes to the syntax, such as using URI/localname pairs everywhere?
> 
> It's too late to fix the problems now, but it's easy to identify them.
> 
> (a) Naming is architecturally fundamental: changing the 
> naming architecture
> of XML by means of a bolt-on to the core standard was an 
> incorrect layering
> that was bound to lead to many practical problems.
> 
> (b) An example of these problems is the incompatibility 
> between namespaces
> and DTDs.
> 
> (c) It has always been ambiguous whether prefixes are 
> significant or not.
> 
> (d) The indirection between prefixes and URIs makes the 
> interpretation of
> many textual fragments (XML entities, XPath expressions, 
> XQueries, even
> schema documents) context-dependent.
> 
> (e) The use of URIs as namespace names has always been fuzzy 
> around the
> edges, as exemplified by the "relative URI" debacle.
> 
> I'm sure I identified these problems on this list while 
> namespaces were
> still in draft, though I can't trace it now. I do clearly 
> recall predicting
> (wrongly, of course) that namespaces were so flawed 
> technically that they
> would never catch on.
> 
> I have advocated one change which I believe would alleviate 
> the problems:
> there should be a lexical representation of expanded names 
> that uses the URI
> and local name, 


That seems to be a "yes" to the last of the questions I asked above:

------
When people complain about namespaces, do they mean that namespaces should not exist at all?  Do they think they are useless?  Or do they think they should be replaced by something else?  Or do they have in mind some simple changes to the syntax, such as using URI/localname pairs everywhere?
------

Joe answered "no" to the same question.

Curiously, most of the responses were related to a question that I did *not* ask ("Why do people complain?").  This is not what I was asking.

I am not advocating any particular position.  I am just curious about what kind of solution people have in mind when they complain, and whether it would be possible to agree on a solution.

Alessandro


> rather than prefix and local name, and this 
> representation
> should be permitted in any context where a lexical QName is permitted,
> including in element names and attribute names in source XML, in
> QName-valued attributes, and in path expressions. This would 
> mean that any
> XML fragment, XPath expression, etc, could be 
> "namespace-normalized" to make
> it context free.
> 
> Michael Kay 
> 
> 

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