Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Re: XML Namespaces difficulty

Author:Dave Winer
Posted:8/30/2000; 7:25:17 AM
Topic:cam?
Msg #:20536 (In response to 20504)
Prev/Next:20535 / 20537

Ken, I don't understand what the rest of this discussion is about, and frankly I don't like seeing my name used in all the examples.

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, but makes it very complicated to someone who doesn't understand what Dublin Core is, or other strange concepts.

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 assume we're talking about the evolution of RSS here. Using namespaces is punting on working cooperatively. My pitch to the RSS community, put in writing, was that we work together. The namespaces-based proposal from O'Reilly et al is a sound "No" to that proposal. Listening to their hype on this, they make it sound as if they tried, and it didn't work, but they didn't try, so they don't know. They compare it to the evolution of HTML and the wars betw Netscape and Microsoft, but I don't see it that way.

Net-net, using namespaces in RSS makes it more complicated, it's hard to argue that it doesn't, and the only valid argument in favor of it, imho, is that the technologists were unwilling to work with each other.

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