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On Fri, 23 Jul 2021 13:21:59 +0200, Marcus Reichardt <u123724@g...> wrote: | (<https://blog.jclark.com/2010/01/xml-namespaces.html>) +1. | My opinion is that namespaces were probably born out of the | expectation that a wealth of new vocabularies would be designed for | the Web, and hence a principled mechanism was thought needed for | avoiding name collisions. That was part of the post-facto "justifications". The initial impetus was the invention of "qualified names" in RDF-XML (a markup mishmash from happy-go-taggy weekenders). This required an imprimatur, since it was part of the W3C Metadata Activity, which at that time Could Do No Wrong and Could Not Be Gainsaid. Qnames were a done deal, essentially by fiat, and it was up to the XML Working Group to cook up a suitable spec. The business about name collisions was a remarkable episode in mass delusion. The means to avoid collisions were already known from the ENR TC and the Hytime standard: they just weren't well-known, and once everyone who mattered was pre-sold on Qnames as the greatest thing since sliced bread, they remained not well-known for good. [For completeness, here is an incomplete essay from long ago on how it works: http://users.nyct.net/~aray/ns/ns.html. And for how the ideas fared on this mailing list, see http://lists.xml.org/archives/xml-dev/200305/threads.html#00787. ] | it seems namespaces are on its way out, at least on the Web. On Stack Overflow, I saw a comment remarking that "XML Namespaces are cargo-cult programming at its finest." Very succinctly put. | So why not drop namespaces alltogether or at least have | their definition not spill into parser layering with unwarranted | complexity such as nesting and redefinitions etc eg. follow the | approach of ISO-19757 (DSDL-9) and use eg. | | <?DSDL-9 bind-ns-to-prefix ns-iri="..." prefix="..."?> I still think losing the atomic nature of basic tokens like names of elements and attributes was a mistake. But, as James wrote, what's done is done. The best we can do now is to ease the transition of namespaces into obsolescence and eventual oblivion.
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