Elliotte Harold wrote:
Julian Reschke wrote:
Parts of the community are totally happy with them.
You have got to be kidding me. I can't think of anyone who is totally
happy with namespaces in XML. I can't even think of anybody who is happy
with. The best I think anyone claims is tolerance. Even full-time XML
geeks like me have a real distaste for namespaces, and admit the design
is seriously flawed.
Seriously, can anyone here stand up and say, "I really like namespaces
in XML."? If so, can you please explain why?
I do.
They solve the problem they are supposed to solve. I've been taking
advantage of them in many many projects over the last few years, and it
really all works as expected.
I admit that there are some aspects that suck; the main one being the
primitive support in DOM, and the fact that it took years until
serializers did work as expected (without the programmer having to
explicitly deal with xmlns attributes).
Of course it's totally cool nowadays to diss XML namespaces -- it would
be interesting to see what other design and syntax would have worked
better, and which decisions about the syntax may be wrong in
retrospective. But then it's also cool to prefer JSON or tag soup over XML.
But that would be a discussion for xml-dev.
BR, Julian
