Musing over Namespaces

[Clark C. Evans]

David,

Are namespaces just a modern way to handle 
inter-woven document type definitions?

BTW, what ever happened to architectural forms
and how is this related? 

...

> Yes, and that's the natural *second* stage of standards development:
> first you allow innovation, then you figure out what to standardize.
> So you start with
> 
>   {http://www.sun.com/ns/}purchase
>   {http://www.ibm.com/ns/}purchase
>   {http://www.amazon.com/ns/}purchase
> 
> and then you bring everyone together for a while, bash heads, and hope 
> that you end up with
> 
>   {http://www.ecommerce-coop.org/ns/}purchase
> 
> It's messy, but it's the only standards path that really seems to
> work.  At least with Namespaces we can remove 50% of the messiness
> (there's no chance of confusing different party's extensions) on the
> way to standards Nirvana.

This sounds reasonable; where the ecommerse-coop.org 
acts like the "OED" previously mentioned...

It'd still be nice to have a single database with 
everyone's namespace definitions in one place though...
perhaps even a DTD to help describe them.  I'm sure 
there are organizations doing this... are there?

> I'm going to write a paper with a catchy title on this topic some day,
> so that I can make US$45M like Eric Raymond just did from "The
> Cathedral and the Bazaar."

Good luck. Eric is a great writer, and a pretty 
good speaker to boot. More than that, he is 
definately _not_ slick...  if he was the nerd 
population would have cast him aside.  And to
put icing on the cake, if you corner him for 
a personal chat, he is an extremely likeable 
fella.  Not to mention his wonderful 
stories (regarless as to how true they are).


;) Clark


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