RE: Namespaces, schemas, Simon's filters.

[Tim Bray <tbray@textuality.com>]

At 01:11 PM 29/08/01 -0700, Fuchs, Matthew wrote:

>Uh, once again the parallel to the original namespace discussion is so
>revealing.  As I recall, the same arguments were made about the linking from
>labels to namespaces - we could have stuck "namespace-pointer attributes" on
>every element designating what namespace it should go in.  However,
>providing a 1-1 map from labels to namespaces was considered crucial, so now
>the labels themselves have been expanded to include the namespace.  Do you
>think that was an error, and we should have adapted architectural forms?

If you were only going to namespace elements, I think the AF approach would
have been the easy winner.  As I recall, applying AFs to attributes involved 
some syntactic ugliness that scared people away.  At one point I was pro-AF 
enough that I suggested that we just bag the idea of attributes in
namespaces, but Jean Paoli and others came up with good use-cases, and in 
retrospect, namespaced attributes do seem to be awfully useful. -Tim