[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: SGML/XML 98 Paris, another take
[Simon North:] | Namespaces: no-one is happy about namespaces. I don't think that's an accurate assessment at all. In some quarters, there is dancing in the streets about namespaces. The specification exactly meets the needs of some really important constituencies. | Maybe I should leave it to Jon himself to speak his piece, but in the | panel session on the current status of the standards (SGML + XML) he | said that XML was almost stopped in its tracks by the W3C because | other working groups claimed that the XML group was not giving them | what they needed. That's true. But they were right: we weren't giving them what they needed. | Namespaces was more or less forced on them (he didn't actually say the | words 'ad hoc solution' but that was the flavour) and there are a lot | of problems with it. What I said, if I remember correctly, was that the needs of other WGs forced completion of the Namespace draft much more quickly than would have been the case in an ISO setting (this was in the context of reports from me regarding W3C XML WG status and from Goldfarb, Price, and Peterson regarding ISO/IEC WG4 status). I said that this gave us much less time than I would have wanted to spend on the problem, which is exceedingly deep, and that as a consequence I personally am very nervous about whether we got it right. In fact, we were (as a result of this nervousness) so conservative in what we actually specified that we probably *did* get it right, and, for all I know, may even have produced a perfect solution. But it will take some implementation to be sure about this. One thing I may not have been sufficiently clear about in my report was that the nervousness I personally feel about the namespace draft isn't about its ability to solve the problems it was designed for (there is universal agreement among the groups for which it was produced that it does) but about the complexities it raises for traditional DTD validation. I probably should have been more explicit about this. However, I was crystal clear -- and I'm a little disappointed that Simon didn't seem to hear this part -- about the fact that a solution to the namespace problem is mission-critical to a number of very important current efforts, not the least of which is the entire electronic commerce initiative, and that the demands by at least three W3C working groups and an IETF working group for a quick solution, while they made our lives miserable for a few months, were in fact entirely reasonable from the viewpoint of the very large issues that those groups are trying to deal with. The fact that solving this kind of problem in a limited amount of time leaves people like me feeling queasy for a while is just one aspect of life in the big city. In industry you accept real requirements and real deadlines and you do the best you can with them. The results are judged on the basis of how well you execute within the given constraints, not on the basis of theoretical perfection. The fact is that the Namespace spec solves some fundamental problems, and in the end, that's what matters. In pointing out the differences between specification definition in an industrial setting (the W3C process) and specification definition in an international standards setting (the ISO process) I certainly didn't mean to imply that we had produced an inferior product; quite the contrary -- I'm very proud of the WG for the work it did in responding to real requirements in a timely fashion, and I believe that the solution we produced is the best that could possibly have been done under the real-life circumstances we had to work with. I think that the WG and, in particular, the three editors of the Namespace draft -- Tim Bray, Dave Hollander, and Andrew Layman -- deserve a huge round of applause for producing a pivotal specification that will enable commerce and collaborative interaction over the web on a scale that will make what's happened so far look like a warmup exercise. Jon xml-dev: A list for W3C XML Developers. To post, mailto:xml-dev@i... Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/xml-dev/ To (un)subscribe, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; (un)subscribe xml-dev To subscribe to the digests, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; subscribe xml-dev-digest List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa@i...)
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