[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: Musing over Namespaces
<boblq> <quote> <author> <lastname>Park</lastname> <firstname>Don</firstname> </author> Is it really a 'good thing' to have namespaces in XML? </quote> Probably not as defined by W3 in the current rec, but ... <quote> <author> <lastname>Reynolds</lastname> <firstname>Gregg</firstname> </author> Do you mean "a means of scoping names, so that a local, apparently atomic name can be mapped to a universal name"? Yes. </quote> <quote> <author> <lastname>Park</lastname> <firstname>Don</firstname> </author> What ill effect will it have on XML's future? <quote> Like all unnecessary complexity it gets in the way of thinking clearly about the problem one is trying to solve. <quote> <author> <lastname>Park</lastname> <firstname>Don</firstname> </author> Why can't the semantic of '<name>' be determined purely by context? </quote> It can. An "elements only" argument was given earlier. <quote> <author> <lastname>Seivers</lastname> <firstname>Kent</firstname> </author> As evidence of this I give 1) almost every other object oriented language in existence. author.name.firstname = 'joe' is easy to understand, and, behind the scenes, since even even an INT is an object and even an "=" is a function, is entirely done in the spirit of "elements only" and 2) the obvious nature of everyones first XML tutorial in which they are typically shown something like <author><firstname>joe<firstname/><author/> and understand it completely. </quote> <quote> <author> <lastname>Park</lastname> <firstname>Don</firstname> </author> What is wrong with using just <html> to distinguish HTML's use of 'a' tag? </quote> Nothing in a fully qualified (hierarchical, See Clark Evan's remarks and example above) context. The <boblq> tag would disambiguate the <html>. >Is the ability to inject attributes from other namespaces really useful? No. <sigh> Yes ... but for legacy reasons </sigh> <quote> <author> <lastname>Park</lastname> <firstname>Don</firstname> </author> What is the positive effect of having just one namespace? </quote> The systematic development of a taxonomic hierarchy closely related to semantics would follow from having a consistant syntax. As it is, folks are hiding like ostrichs from this problem which syntax will never solve. <quote> <author> <lastname>Park</lastname> <firstname>Don</firstname> </author> Why can't we have central registry of XML names? </quote> Good question. Better question, Why can't we have a distributed registry? Actually I think, in some sense, as David Meggison has pointed out such a registration mechanism is the essense of the W3 name identification mechanism which is one part of the rec that I do like. So I suggest following Don's suggestion: purchase {http://www.w3.org/ns/} default definition {http://www.sun.com/ns/} variant {http://www.ibm.com/ns/} variant {http://www.amazon.com/ns/} variant where the variants are diffs from the default. I would hope the W3 is a decent place to get the "default definition" adjudicated. Certainly W3 is not Network Solutions ;( but than it is not the IETF either. I believe the Jabber guys are working a distributed namespace management system for their own purposes but I have not reviewed it. A Jabberite might care to comment. </boblq> 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 unsubscribe, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; unsubscribe 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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