On Fri, 2005-01-28 at 16:50 +0000, Frans Englich wrote: > This is my opinion. > > If I were to design XBEL from the ground up I would have put it in a > namespace. Doing it at this point would be done in the name of somekind of > "XML-correctness". While it itches to suggest it, I don't think it justifies > all the compatibility havoc it creates.
Namespaces don't really have anything to do with XML correctness. I think this is a popular misconception. Namespaces are meant to solve a particular problem in XML. Many argue it makes a hash of the solution (I'm somewhat in the middle), but I think everyone would agree that if you don't have the problem, there is no need to complicate things by using namespaces. Knee-jerk use of namespaces is as bad as knee-jerk use of rat traps. If you don't have a rodent infestation, there is no point putting rat traps around the house and thus risking a swollen toe :-) I believe that if we were creating XBEL the very first time now, I would still argue against a namespace. -- Uche Ogbuji Fourthought, Inc. http://uche.ogbuji.net http://4Suite.org http://fourthought.com Use CSS to display XML - http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/edu/x-dw-x-xmlcss-i.html Introducing the Amara XML Toolkit - http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2005/01/19/amara.html Be humble, not imperial (in design) - http://www.adtmag.com/article.asp?id=10286 Querying WordNet as XML - http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-think29.html Manage XML collections with XAPI - http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-xapi.html Default and error handling in XSLT lookup tables - http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-tiplook.html Packaging XSLT lookup tables as EXSLT functions - http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-tiplook2.html _______________________________________________ XML-SIG maillist - XML-SIG@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/xml-sig
