• From: Dave Pawson <dave.pawson@g...>
• To: Rick Jelliffe <rjelliffe@a...>
• Date: Sat, 24 Jul 2021 08:33:19 +0100

A user perspective.
  Get rid of namespaces in newml. Confusing, long winded and little
use in XML instances.
If I want disambiguation, I can use two element names.

regards

On Sat, 24 Jul 2021 at 08:18, Rick Jelliffe <rjelliffe@a...> wrote:
>
> Marcus R brought up this blog recently:
>    https://blog.jclark.com/2010/01/xml-namespaces.html
> Here is a summary of the various POVs.
>
> James C:  Capability is occasionally useful, but not that useful. prefix/namespace disutiliy outweighs utility.
>      Using URIs was not necessary and uncritically adopted.  But good for RDF.
>     Nesting declarations seemed reasonable at the time, but ....
>
> Michael K: Should be built in, not layered.     Using URIs is a misguided. URIs don't get dereferenced to get the schema
> etc anyway.   Unclarity about infoset status of prefixes.
>
> E Rusty H:  Qnames in content a mistake. (Namespace declarations apply to XPaths in attributes? RJ: not in Schematron
> they don't!)    Making declarations element-scoped (rather than document-scoped) and overrideable (especially
> default mapping) is the problem.
>
> Mukul G:  Being able to bind to schemas, and preventing name collusions is useful.
>      (But don't adopt unless clearly required.)
>
> Tony C, Unknown, Anonymous. Ditto    What is the alternative?  How do we automatically bind a document to a schema?
>
> Orcmid: Inability to have certainty w.r.t. schemas.
>
> LIam Q: HTML5 crowd also dislikes namespace syntax: the HTML 5 processor implies the namespace from the element name.
>   Proposal for "Unobtrusive Namespaces" and "Imaginary Namespaces"
>
> David RRW:  CAM uses dictionary instead of namespaces. (I.e. individual name registration?)
>      Only place namespaces were useful was distinguishing (formatting)  annotations not part of original content.
>
> Ed D:  No mechanism to say when qname in content is used.  DTDs should have been made namespace aware.
>
> Pierre A: Good to integrate namespaces into XML spec.   Use of qnames in content difficult.
>
> Murata-sensei:  Namespace declarations better as PIs.  Nesting bindings a problem.  qnames in content (or attributes)
>    not handled uniformly.
>
> John C:LMNL didn't allow prefix remapping or multiple prefixes for the same URI.  Namespace declarations not tied to elements. Lexical scoping.  Different rules for default namespace.
>
> Gavin N: Namespaces add significantly to DOM size.  Couples processing and semantcs unnecessarily.  Namespaces fight extensibility.
>
> Bent R: Namespaces not used enough.  Could get rid of comment and PII syntax by making a namespace for them instead. "Is human readability a benefit or an issue?" It "leads to things like attributes". "Really there are only elements"
>
> Virendra:  need out-of-the-box approach (i.e. a different over-web mechanism not just a different syntax?)
>
> To which I add:
>
> Rick: Setting default namespaces and nested or local declarations and redeclarations work against "manifest markup" where you only need to look at the tag (and perhaps a header) to know what is going on. I appreciate that it was a useful mechanism for, e.g. pulling in HTML documents into XHTML without having to prefix every element name in a tag or mess up CSS stylesheets; however perhaps XHTML was really a one-off, and not so compelling now.
>
>
> Regards
> Rick
>


-- 
Dave Pawson
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• References:
  • Summary of critiques of XML Namespace from comments to James Clark2010 blog
    • From: Rick Jelliffe <rjelliffe@a...>