Re: ANN: SAX Filters for Namespace Processing

[Sean McGrath <sean.mcgrath@propylon.com>]

[Francis Norton]

>So yes they may be equivalent, and given that the new usage pretty
>effectively breaks the namespace processing model of existing tools like
>XSLT I can see why Simon would like to convert them.

So we can now finally ditch the nonsense notion prominent in some
circles that namespaces are simple? Good.

I remember the early days of namespace rec. development when people
where talking about namespaces having no effect on parsers, no effect
on apis etc. I find it very depressing to look at the
increase in complexity of fundamental subsystems such as
SAX/DOM/XPATH/Query etc.etc. because of namespaces.
I have been putting angle bracketed tags in text files for a decade and
frankly never felt a compelling need for what namespaces offers me.

Most of the complexity boils down to the contextual processing
problem. This is not the same problem as "disambiguation" which
is what the namespace rec. set out to achieve.

Context is always a difficult problem. Namespaces writes
the context problem in stone and makes it an
"in your face" aspect of pretty much everything you
might want to do with XML documents.

Context always boils down to local processing semantics
and markup supporting context should be locally rather
than globally agreed. IMO.

Disambiguation and context are too different things. The conflation
of disambiguation with context that has resulted as a consequence
of namespace defaulting rules and the interpretable semantics
of same is very unfortunate.

Sean