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[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: limits of the generic
 "Thomas B. Passin" <tpassin@c...> wrote: | [Arjun Ray] |> In what sense are namespaces (as defined in the Rec) "generic"? | I said "generic" because namespaces apply to all the specializations | (at least, those that make use of them), but the details of the | namespaces and what they denote can be specialized. Well, that's a peculiar statement, too. Weren't namespaces supposed to be (the essential component of) a generalization to multiple "vocabularies" in a single document? Would we want a specialized way to generalize, or would we want a generic way to generalize? Or, are you saying, multiple vocabularies are a specialization of single vocabularies, and therefore any method to accomplish that, or even to appear to accomplish that - such as namespaces - is generic? | This is much like providing for element names in xml of sgml - the generic | spec sets forth hwo to construct names but leaves it to the specialized | uses to refine and constrain. That would be colonified names. I can think of uses for the syntactic device per se, but the namespaces bogosity - which tries to philosophize on the prefix - is not one of them. :-) | Even though I labeled namespaces as a generic addition to the generic | nature of the original xml rec, I certainly agree that they constrain that | rec. I am saying that they do it at a fairly non-specific level. I couldn't disagree more. They cripple it. Note that all the problems with namespaces are precisely in the mulitple-vocabulary context. Wow. | I think you are articulating one of my points, that the way more | specialised or contraining specs work with the more generic ones is very | important but also it is non-trivial to arrive at a good solution. There is no good solution when politics preordain the outcome. The myth simply will not die that namespaces were a "technical solution" of some kind. They were a year's worth of insensate babbling about "universal names" and whatnot tacked onto a favored syntactic device that gave enough in the way of warm fuzzy feelings in some influential quarters that they simply had to have it. | So I would argue that, from the point of view of augmenting the basic | generic spec (xml 1.0), namespaces did pretty well. They've kept a lot of people busy, yes.;-) 
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