xml-dev - RE: power uses of XML vs. simple uses of XML

[johns@syscore.com (John F. Schlesinger)]

Matt wrote:
"I feel the opposite. Namespaces are incredibly useful for modularisation,
and should be used to ensure that your DTD for one application is
sensible and re-usable."

I've got to agree with Matt.

Let's say you are composing a document with a couple of SVG pictures, a
couple of XHTML tables, some mark up from your own problem domain and some
from another - how are you going to do that without namespaces? Almost all
of these are going to have element or attribute names clashes somewhere.

Namespaces are relatively straight forward - except for the different rules
for attributes and elements...

Yours,
John F Schlesinger
SysCore Solutions
212 619 5200 x 219
917 886 5895 Mobile

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-xml-dev@xml.org [mailto:owner-xml-dev@xml.org]On Behalf Of
Matt Sergeant
Sent: Sunday, July 09, 2000 7:44 AM
To: Gavin Thomas Nicol
Cc: XML-Dev Mailing list
Subject: RE: power uses of XML vs. simple uses of XML


On Sun, 9 Jul 2000, Gavin Thomas Nicol wrote:

> > I think namespaces is something different - the more people use XML in a
> > variety of ways the more likely they are to need namespaces eventually.
>
> I'm not sure about that. If you control the application in a given
> domain, then you control the semantics of the encoded data, and in
> such cases, even if you are embedding XHTML in your content, you
> don't need namespaces to tell you that.

I think maybe you missed my point about "a variety of ways". If you're
only using XML in one domain and you don't need namespaces then there's
no need to gratuitously implement them. But work in different
areas/domains and with different technologies and eventually you're going
to run into a need for namespaces, unless you expand your tagset/DTD
beyond all sensibility.

> I think namespaces are really only useful in a limited number of cases
> (where arbitrary embedding is common) unless they are being used
> gratuitously.

I feel the opposite. Namespaces are incredibly useful for modularisation,
and should be used to ensure that your DTD for one application is
sensible and re-usable.

--
<Matt/>

Fastnet Software Ltd. High Performance Web Specialists
Providing mod_perl, XML, Sybase and Oracle solutions
Email for training and consultancy availability.
http://sergeant.org | AxKit: http://axkit.org


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