Let me just chime in here, and point out a few things Mark didn't touch on:
1) Namespaces exist for a very good reason. An even better-known issue in the development community is that if you have two or more groups allocating names, name collisions will eventually screw you really, really badly. In this case, every platform release would screw a lot of people. Namespaces are the *STANDARD* XML way of handling this. So the Android developers SHOULD NOT change anything. 2) If you are finding it difficult to edit these, I suggest you invest in a reasonable XML editing tool. Microsoft even has a free one, but the one I like is <Oxygen/> (oxygenxml.com). I don't find XML all that difficult to edit, or read, but still, I find the tool very useful, because it lets me do things like search using XPath expressions, or perform (and debug) XSLT transformations to modify and update my XML files -- including layout files. It also integrates nicely with Eclipse. Most often when people complain about stuff like this, improving the tools is a better solution than ignoring functional constraints in favor of "readability". And seriously, you could have replaced all occurrences of xmlns:android= and android: with xmlns:a= and a: in far less time than it took you to complain here. OK, you didn't know enough about XML to know you could do that; I accept that. I'm just pointing out the ultimate source of your difficulty. XML has become so ubiquitous, learning all about XML, namespaces, various types of XML parsers, XHTML, XPath, and XSLT are all high on the list of things every developer really ought to learn to use effectively. Yes, I know that's a lot to learn, on an even longer list of things every developer "ought" to know. But they're all high on the list. You may also not have realized yet that users can define their own tags and attributes for various purposes. But the use of namespaces and namespace prefixes should have been a clue that that was likely. On Mar 7, 10:42 pm, sstrenn <[email protected]> wrote: > Is there any plan to eliminate the requirement to add the "android:" > namespace to attributes in layout files? > > In my current project, "android:" prefixes make up a little over 20% > of all of the text in the layout files. And instead of adding value, > they make the files VERY DIFFICULT TO READ AND EDIT. I believe it is > a well known maxim in the developer community that code is read many > more times than it is written. > > Is there any relief in sight? -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Android Developers" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/android-developers?hl=en
