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Re: namespace reprise

• To: Dare Obasanjo <dareo@m...>, xml-dev@l...
• Subject: Re: namespace reprise
• From: "Emmanuil Batsis (Manos)" <mbatsis@h...>
• Date: Wed, 21 Aug 2002 04:18:53 +0300
• References: <8BD7226E07DDFF49AF5EF4030ACE0B7E0696F80C@r...>
• User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.1b) Gecko/20020721

Dare Obasanjo wrote:

>I'd be more interested in someone who can point out the the difficulty
>caused by namespaces in XML that don't boil down to philosophical or
>aesthetic arguments. 
>

Namespaces should point to schemas, being the actual vocabulary 
definition pointer. Even better, it should point to an an RDF document 
(after all, RDF is about metadata) or perhaps something like an RDDL 
doc, or whatever.

Secondly, a namespace URI designed *not* to actually point to something, 
should not be a URL or any other type of URI that uses a scheme designed 
to be used for resource retreival.

Attributes, the base of numerous debate around XML are also tortured by 
the XML names recommendation, meaning the default namespaces do not 
apply directly to attributes" part. I never managed to understand the 
reasoning behind this.

Another thing that bothers me is the rough edges concerning APIs. Most 
APIs handle namespaces in a really stupid way. Even XPath in XSLT 
(which, IMHO is by far the best in it's anticipation of namespaces 
thanks to the according axis) is incapable of dynamically producing 
namespaces and one must know the default namespace to match the desired 
nodes.. Also, if I'm not wrong, if there are no namespace declarations 
then XSLT anticipates the empty string as the default namespace (but one 
may correct me in this one). Surelly this is another rec but if 
namespaces are not implemented consistently and effisiently in other 
applications then there must be something wrong with them ;-)

One thing noted in other posts is URI authority but I don't think this 
is important and I'm sure it's pretty tough to find a reason to use a 
URI you don't own (where own means anything) as a base for yours and be 
able to make something out of it.

The rest of my complaints on namespaces are in URI orbit, thus a level 
lower in the architecture, i.e. what a fragment identifier denotes 
(perhaps depending on MIME type), how that should be associated with an 
xml:id and the like. I just  don't like the document view of resources 
around, which is another reason against schemaLocation vs namespaces 
used for pointing to schemas or even fragments of those such as complex 
type definitions (in my dreams unfortunatelly).

Cheers,

Manos

• Follow-Ups:
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    • From: "Dare Obasanjo" <dareo@m...>

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