xml-dev - Re: W3C's 'Moral Majesty'

["Steven R. Newcomb" <srn@techno.com>]

[Tim Bray:]

> Namespaces are a facility to make names universal, no more, no less.

They don't accomplish that goal.  Now that we've done away with the
requirement that there be a DTD, surprise! we still need models.
Namespaces, however, are not models, and the actual model that you
must know, in order to be able to write software to work with a
namespace, doesn't have to be published in order to be used.  So, now
we have a situation in which software vendors can benefit from the
sheer secrecy of their information architectures.  This is progress?
I don't think so.  In terms of the public interest, this is a huge
step backwards.  This is precisely the opposite outcome from the
reason why I have devoted 14 years of my life to generalized markup.

> Making the names that populate that markup universal, so that
> vocabularies can freely be mixed, simply adds robustness to the
> system in the face of the fact that the days of the Great
> Centralized Committee-Built DTD In The Sky are over (good
> riddance). -Tim

If vocabularies can be *freely* mixed, then they have no internal
structuring requirements in order to make sense.  Any name can appear
anywhere at all, including inside elements from the same namespace
where they don't make sense according to the (unpublished and, at this
point in time, unpublishable) requirements of that namespace.  So now
we have a situation in which there is no basis for syntactic
validation.  The whole business of what constitutes syntactic validity
can be a secret between those who met to make a Great Centralized
Committee-Built DTD In The Sky (but instead of calling it a DTD, it's
called a "namespace" -- something that has no formal existence).  This
is not progress, and it's not robustness, either.  In terms of the
public interest, this is a huge step backwards.

-Steve

--
Steven R. Newcomb, President, TechnoTeacher, Inc.
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