[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: HTML5 and almost no namespaces
> Are you suggesting that current XML namespaces are bad for every known > uses of XML? > There has been a great deal of discussion of the namespace problem on this list over the years, and I'm a bit reluctant to spend a lot of time covering the ground again. But I think the problems with namespaces reduce to a number of general categories: * Learning problems for beginners: the specifications are non-intuitive, hard to understand, and inconsistent; for example, namespace declarations sometimes behave like attributes and sometimes don't. * Usability problems even for experienced users: the context-sensitivity of namespace prefixes makes it hard to get transformations right, and means that simple operations like cut-and-paste can produce incorrect results. * Difficulties for implementors of tools: if you're writing XML processing software such as an XSLT or XQuery engine, or a schema processor or XML editor, then getting namespaces right absorbs a ridiculous proportion of your time; in consequence, there are many tools out there that don't get it right, which creates more difficulties for users. The complexity is unnecessary. Most of it derives from the fact that the namespace design introduces context-sensitivity (in-scope namespaces), which means that fragments of XML cannot be interpreted in isolation of where they appear. * Interoperability problems: the fact that XML element names are not simple strings makes it difficult to define clean interfaces with other environments, for example data interchange with other formats, or programming language APIs. The basic problem of resolving ambiguous local names could have been solved without these complexities. Michael Kay Saxonica
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