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Re: HTML5 and almost no namespaces

• From: Michael Kay <mike@saxonica.com>
• To: xml-dev@lists.xml.org
• Date: Thu, 02 Jun 2011 12:07:41 +0100

On 02/06/2011 11:44, Mukul Gandhi wrote:
> With due respects to people who dislike XML namespaces,
>
> Consider the following example:
>
> The element "name" here represents an organization name.
>
> <name xmlns="http://organization-ns">ABC corp</name>
>
> The element "name" here represents a person name.
>
> <name xmlns="http://person-ns">Jill Doe</name>
>
> If I'm presented with either (or both) of these documents, the
> namespace binding helps me (and my XML application) to make a logical
> association between the XML markup and to the domain with which it is
> related to.
>
> And we all say that, XML namespaces helps us to avoid name collisions
> (one of the example of this is given above).
>
> I (therefore) personally like XML namespaces. It's an optional
> feature. If someone doesn't need XML namespaces in an application, the
> XML software stack allows implementing such a design decision.
>

You're saying you like namespaces because they are a solution to a real 
problem.

But the objection to namespaces is not that there is no problem to be 
solved, it is that namespaces (as currently defined) are a bad solution 
to that problem; they introduce far too much complexity in relation to 
the size of the problem. Far simpler solutions are available to allow 
names to be disambiguated.

Michael Kay
Saxonica

• Follow-Ups:
  • Re: HTML5 and almost no namespaces
    • From: Michael Sokolov <sokolov@ifactory.com>

• References:
  • HTML5 and almost no namespaces
    • From: Jesper Tverskov <jesper.tverskov@gmail.com>
  • Re: HTML5 and almost no namespaces
    • From: Stephen D Green <stephengreenubl@gmail.com>
  • Re: HTML5 and almost no namespaces
    • From: Mukul Gandhi <gandhi.mukul@gmail.com>