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Re: Summary of critiques of XML Namespace from comments toJame

• From: Pete Cordell <pete++xmldev@codalogic.com>
• To: Rick Jelliffe <rjelliffe@allette.com.au>, xml-dev <xml-dev@l...>
• Date: Mon, 26 Jul 2021 17:59:39 +0100

Marcus R brought up this blog recently:

   https://blog.jclark.com/2010/01/xml-namespaces.html

Here is a summary of the various POVs.

James C:  Capability is occasionally useful, but not that useful. prefix/namespace disutiliy outweighs utility. 
     Using URIs was not necessary and uncritically adopted.  But good for RDF. 

    Nesting declarations seemed reasonable at the time, but ....

Michael K: Should be built in, not layered.     Using URIs is a misguided. URIs don't get dereferenced to get the schema

etc anyway.   Unclarity about infoset status of prefixes.

I like the idea of dispensing with URIs in namespaces as well.  The simplest idea I can come up with is using inverse domain names as fully qualified names and having children inherit the namespace of their parent if they aren't fully qualified.

So you might have:

<com.example.myvocabulary.top>
    <middle />
</com.example.myvocabulary.top>

which would be equivalent to:

<com.example.myvocabulary.top>
    <com.example.myvocabulary.middle />
</com.example.myvocabulary.top>

(For a new syntax you could even say that an end tag adopts the namespace of its start tag if it is not fully qualified, for example:

<com.example.myvocabulary.top>
    <middle />
</top>
)

You could either rely on search engines to find out more details about the com.example.myvocabulary vocabulary, or have an algorithm such that you first query http://example.com/myvocabulary and if that doesn't yield anything, you look up http://myvocabulary.example.com/

This would also work with JSON.

Cheers,

Pete.
-- 
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Pete Cordell
Codalogic Ltd
Read & write XML in C++, http://www.xml2cpp.com
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  • Re: Summary of critiques of XML Namespace from commentsto James Clark 2010 blog
    • From: Amelia A Lewis <amyzing@talsever.com>

• References:
  • Summary of critiques of XML Namespace from comments to James Clark2010 blog
    • From: Rick Jelliffe <rjelliffe@allette.com.au>