[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] NAMESPACES: expressing commonality or distinction
James Tauber writes: > I imagine that most people would agree that: > > 1. There is a difference between strict:p and transitional:p > 2. The difference is small and most applications will not care > about it And for those that do, an 'html:version' attribute would be quite sufficient -- applications could ignore it easily if they didn't need it, but would have all of the required versioning information if they did. > 3. Most applications *will* care about the commonality > > But the fact of the matter is that it is application-specific. Yes, but who cares? Writing standards is about interoperability, not theoretical completeness. Proper standard writing requires fierce cost-benefit analysis: the proper question is "what will bring the most good to the most users with the simplest spec", not "how much can fit into this spec in case someone wants it some day". One problem is that ISO and the W3C are both doing standardization backwards these days -- the idea of standardization is traditionally to align current practice (we all have railroads, so let's use the same rail gauge), not to invent new practice (hey, maybe someone will invent railroads in fifty years -- let's standardize the gauge for all four rails that we think they might need, and the width of the brick path for the horse in the middle while we're at it [at which point a long debate ensues about whether horses or donkeys will pull trains]). Once we start standardizing things that don't exist yet, we're really wasting everyone's time -- after all, spec writers like me aren't smart enough for that sort of thing. For example, take SAX 1.0 -- when we developed it, nearly every XML or SGML parser had it's own, slightly-different event-based API. SAX didn't really innovate or add new kinds of functionality -- it just pulled all of those together so that parsers could benefit from the network effect. Likewise, people were already using SGML (on the one hand) and extending HTML (on the other), and most of us in the SGML community had agreed that we could jettison some of the stuff in ISO 8879 so there was a proven need for XML. All the best, David -- David Megginson david@m... http://www.megginson.com/ 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/ and on CD-ROM/ISBN 981-02-3594-1 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...)
|
PURCHASE STYLUS STUDIO ONLINE TODAY!Purchasing Stylus Studio from our online shop is Easy, Secure and Value Priced! Download The World's Best XML IDE!Accelerate XML development with our award-winning XML IDE - Download a free trial today! Subscribe in XML format
|