Next Round

[Chris Maden]

As someone completely uninvolved with the Namespaces development, I
find your rhetoric pretty funny.  I especially liked the bit about
dying childless at 40.

What, exactly, are the problems with the draft?  It provides a scheme
for uniquely naming objects.  When I say, "html:a", I mean the anchor
element from HTML; when I say, "faq:a", I mean the answer element from
the FAQ ML.  Just like when, in the context of HTML, I say "p", I mean
the paragraph from HTML.  If you know what to do with "the anchor
element from HTML", you do it, if not, you don't.  Why are namespace-
derived names harder to handle than any other system of naming?

As far as I can tell, the biggest problem is the possibility that a
prefix's meaning can change within a document.  But your processor
should be operating on URI+suffix, not the prefix, and changing a
mapping table can't be *that* hard.

True, I'm not a sophisticated programmer, and I may be overlooking
something.  But I have a hard time seeing Tim Bray and James Clark
bulled by political pressure, even (especially?) from Microsoft.

In short, can we try to keep the discussion, at least on this list, to
concrete technical issues?

-Chris
-- 
<!NOTATION SGML.Geek PUBLIC "-//Anonymous//NOTATION SGML Geek//EN">
<!ENTITY crism PUBLIC "-//O'Reilly//NONSGML Christopher R. Maden//EN"
"<URL>http://www.oreilly.com/people/staff/crism/ <TEL>+1.617.499.7487
<USMAIL>90 Sherman Street, Cambridge, MA 02140 USA" NDATA SGML.Geek>

xml-dev: A list for W3C XML Developers. To post, mailto:xml-dev at ic.ac.uk
Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/xml-dev/
To (un)subscribe, mailto:majordomo at ic.ac.uk the following message;
(un)subscribe xml-dev
To subscribe to the digests, mailto:majordomo at ic.ac.uk the following message;
subscribe xml-dev-digest
List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa at ic.ac.uk)