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

["Gavin Thomas Nicol" <gtn@ebt.com>]

> > 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.

Well, I haven't seen too many applications where XML is used "in a variety
of ways". That may be the future, but typically, vocabularies/tagsets
are controlled quite tightly.

Think of it this way: if your application knows nothing about XHTML, and
someone randomly embeds <xhtml:p> in the data, what will it do with it?
I think this is the normal case: at best the application can embed a
handler,
typically, it will ignore it, and in the worste case, it will cause the
app to fail.



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