Re: How to design XML to have broad utility and yet alsoenable

On Thu, Nov 21, 2013 at 5:03 PM, John Cowan <johnwcowan@gmail.com> wrote:

On Thu, Nov 21, 2013 at 4:23 PM, David Lee <dlee@calldei.com> wrote:

 Well, I did an analysis a while back of all the schemas we had published so far.  It turned out that the namespace URI for this private namespace existed in 12 different incompatible variants.  If we, the schema creators, can't get it right, what hope is there for anyone else?

 

Writing good software takes work, there is no holy grail of "No Code Needed" or "No Brain Needed".

No, but there's such a thing as gratuitous difficulty.

Almost no one gets namespaces right. Almost no one. I've found it hilarious in recent threads how many times people would say "namespaces are great!" or "namespaces are no big deal!" and then within a few sentences commit some of the most common namespaces errors. Most of these I'm pretty sure we've all let pass without the requisite "GOTCHA!" because, hey, we're so used to people not getting namespaces right that we hardly even notice any more. I hardly do, until something breaks somewhere along my chain of responsibility, of course. Naturally I've been doing everything I can to eliminate namespaces from my areas of responsibility, even to the extent of minimizing use of XSLT.

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