[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] RE: a namespace definitions related question(s)
Hello, Thank you. Conformance to the standards and recommendations is indeed important to me. Hopefully, as my understanding of the standards increases so will the relationships among them will get clearer. Thanks again to you and others that have contributed to this discussion. It was useful and informative to me. Shlomo. -----Original Message----- From: noah_mendelsohn@u... [mailto:noah_mendelsohn@u...] Sent: â 20 ôáøåàø 2007 19:07 To: Shlomo Yona Cc: Pete Cordell; xml-dev@l... Subject: RE: a namespace definitions related question(s) Shlomo Yona write: > What I'm asking is, is there a downside to "semantically" > matching start/end tags by using namespace information? Yes indeed, there is a big downside. Part of the value that XML brings to the industry is good, uniform interoperability. What's accepted by one XML processor is generally accepted by another. That's true across software vendors and hardware platforms. The same XML documents will likely be successfully readable by pretty much any commercial or open source XML database, by a range of "office" applications, by XML editors, by XSL-based styling tools, etc., etc.. While there can be sort of oddball reasons for occasionally using software that accepts input that does not conform to the specifications, proliferation of software that fails to enforce the specifications encourages people to write and exchange buggy XML documents. That in turn puts pressure on those who have written "correct" software to modify it to accept whatever sorts of documents seem to be flying around. But, and this is the really big problem, there's no specification for such looser content, so there are no test cases, so everyone's likely to do it differently. The interoperability that made XML valuable in the first place is lost. Now, if you're asking: if the XML and Namespaces Recommendations had been developed together, rather than one after the other, might there have been some other options open for tag matching? Yes probably. But that's not how the specifications were developed. By the time Namespaces were being crafted, XML was already a stable Recommendation. The designers of Namespaces made the call that their specifications would apply only to documents that were already legal XML, and that meant that they could not even seriously consider matching tags at the semantic level you're asking about. Given that the specifications are as they are, I'd strongly urge you to write content that conforms, and to use software that enforces such conformance, wherever reasonably practical. The payoff for you is that your XML will work with an extraordinarily broad range of current and future software. They payoff for everyone else is that none of our support lines will be ringing with bug reports like: "my XML works in Shlomo's software, how come it doesn't work with yours?". -------------------------------------- Noah Mendelsohn IBM Corporation One Rogers Street Cambridge, MA 02142 1-617-693-4036 --------------------------------------
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