Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.
Re: XML Namespaces difficulty
Author: David Adams Posted: 8/30/2000; 9:49:58 AM Topic: cam? Msg #: 20546 (In response to 20536) Prev/Next: 20545 / 20547
The problem with namespaces at a user or HTML-coder level is that it scatters the docs for a format across a variety of sites, an unknown number, with varying quality, and doesn't do anything to avoid semantic collisions and creates an infinite number of sub-formats, which might be satisfying to someone who has devoted their whole existence to appreciating the intricacies.... The flames and disagreements and forks still happen. You get fifteen ways of saying the same thing. And fifteen "best practices" documents instead of a single easy spec to follow.I'm not claiming to fully understand XML Namespaces, because I really haven't done much research on the subject, but my understanding of it is that it provides a way to uniquely identify your tags and attributes, so that if someone comes along and produces a variation of an RSS document or an outlineDocument document or a scriptingNews document or a davesWackyXMLFormat document, one can tell the difference between the tags one's program understands and the ones it doesn't (the ones it will ignore).
It does provide a(n easy-to-excuse?) route to create sub-formats of existing formats, with the consequences that such forking causes. However, if a fork in a document format is going to occur, namespaces provide a safe way of doing so. It provides a more robust way to know if one can trust the content of certain tags to be meaningful to one's program than a document version number can alone.
I assume we're talking about the evolution of RSS here. Using namespaces is punting on working cooperatively.... Net-net, using namespaces in RSS makes it more complicated, it's hard to argue that it doesn't
Namespaces do indeed make the generation of RSS documents more complicated. It also clutters them up further, making them more intimidating and difficult to read. But in a way, it seems to me that namespaces could make things easier on one's program, because it could ignore tags its RSS parser doesn't know about (not that it can't anyway, but if someone was using another variant of RSS that happened to use names identical to ones included in the version the program was using, the program would be able to tell the difference and safely ignore the meaningless (to the program) tags).
and the only valid argument in favor of it, imho, is that the technologists were unwilling to work with each other.
Well, if one was cynical enough, one would say that there are always going to be some technologists who won't be able to work with each other. Cooperating is harder to do than going on one's own. Namespaces could provide a safe way for non-cooperating groups to share a standard. Instead of a complete fork, the groups could agree on certain elements and then each define their own sub-formats. Sure, that isn't necessarily the optimal solution, but it's at least a workable one.
Or it might all be pointless! :) Maybe I've misunderstood the use of XML Namespaces and I'm just leading this discussion nowhere. That's entirely possible. Everyone please feel free to point out what I've gotten wrong.
-dave
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