Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.
Re: xml namespaces
At first I thought XML namespaces were annoying and superfluous. After working with XML for a little bit, I've come to see the wisdom of them.
The issue, it seems to me, is that XML developers mostly see XML as a better alternative to comma delimited flat files for data exchange. I hope for more out of the XML, I'd like to see it used as a real markup language, just as I'd hoped that people would adopt the semantic markup tags in HTML rather than the appearance based ones. Alas, everyone seems to have forgotten that
To take a recent use case, I was walking down the street, talking with a colleague about the Open Source conference. We were discussing what looked interesting on the schedule, so I popped up the browser on my OmniSky enhanced Palm and opened the web page. It would have been really cool had I been able to say "add this page's schedule information to my calendar".
In implementing this über web we seem to have two choices:
- Build an XML replacement for HTML that allows us to embed all the semantic information in the documents, and make it comprehensive enough to cover all possible applications.
- Use namespaces so that savvy developers can use whatever XML/XSL systems they want for formatting, and use the appropriate definitions for the semantic content
Given that we can't get web "designers" to abandon appearance for the sake of semantic content enough to use the original semantic markup tags that have been present in HTML since the very beginning, I'm guessing that the former option isn't gonna happen any time soon. However, if I can say to web publishers "hey, put some useful markup happening.
But, ya know, useful content on the web is such a last century idea.
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