Colonialism, SAX, Java, and Namespaces

[Jerome McDonough]

At 09:25 AM 2/5/1999 -0600, Paul Prescod wrote:
>Namespaces are an infrastructure technology. You use them THROUGH
>something, like RDF. Without something like RDF they are essentially
>useless. So unless you think that "RDF" is for the "average developer",
>namespaces are not for the average developer. When/if something like RDF
>takes off that situation may change.
>

I would argue, actually, that most average developers are going to have
to deal with RDF.  With the proliferation of information that all 
organizations are having to cope with, metadata to keep track of the
information will be more and more essential.  And RDF seems to be gaining
significant mindshare as the way to store metadata among the SGML/XML
crowd.  If that trend continues, any developer working in medium-to-large
organizations is going to be dealing with RDF, and hence, namespaces.
This doesn't necessarily argue for any changes in the namespace spec,
but assumptions that the average developer isn't going to have to deal
with RDF (or any other metadata encoding standard) may be a bit rash.


Jerome McDonough -- jmcdonou at library.Berkeley.EDU  |  (......)
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