But part of what I'm trying to do is just get people to be creative
about solutions to this problem. The problem I see is not that XML
namespaces are bad, but more that parcel.xml is a ridiculously complex
system for the few specific uses most developers will need it for.
Another idea I had, related: domain-specific XML. Right now parcel.xml
is this unifying mechanism for defining all data.. but if users are
mostly defining one or two types of data (UI elements, and maybe wakeup
callers) perhaps we could think about some domain-specific schemas for
some of this.... for example, block XML which would look like HTML or
XUL... in that specific case, we could define a decent schema which
covered 99% of UI declarations, and use things like namespaces to add
custom tags and the like.
I think we'd indeed like to explore this option, but its not really on
the table for 0.6, as it will have a non trivial impact on the existing
code. The schema API was our major step in improving the situation for
0.6. PJE's namespace proposal is a low-impact, incremental improvement
that is also feasible for 0.6.
That said, I'd love to see a proposal for domain-specific XML that would
work for 0.7...
Cheers,
Katie
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