XML in the real world... Was "Re: Another look at namespaces"

[David Carlisle]

Ann said

> We need to be careful to remember that when working with Recommendations,
> our own personal experiences aren't the only experiences that are
> applicable.

True, but personal experience is nevertheless a useful guide.
Given that it is (in my experience) so much more inconvenient to
use a namespace aware application (such as xslt, which is currently the
most common namespace aware application) with XHTML using multiple
namespaces, I have to ask, has _anyone_ who is proposing that this is a
good idea actually tried using the multiple namespace approach in
practice?

If you are using an application that ignores the namespace declaration
then arguing the finer points of which is the more correct namespace
model is an interesting, but not very practical, exercise.

My fear is that as the extra effort to use multiple namespaces will be
too great for most people, the actual result of an XHTML with 3
namespaces will be that the vast majority of XHTML documents will
not specify a namespace at all, thus making it easier to write
stylesheets etc. (eg <xsl:template match="h1"> ...) This will put
a broad class of XHTML documents into the null namespace which will
totally break the whole intention of namespaces that would allow
tools to recognise XHTML elements as XHTML rather than some other
XML element that just happens to have the same name.


David

PS
Ann, I know (from personal experience:-) what it is like to be upholding
an official line in the face of multiple complaints on a public list.
I admire the way in which you've kept your calm, and managed to respond
to most of the incoming flood.

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/ and on CD-ROM/ISBN 981-02-3594-1
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)