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1/30/2002 2:46:16 PM, "Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@simonstl.com>
wrote:
>I just marvel at how they could have reached that conclusion from
any
>experience with XML namespaces such as they are!
>
Nobody in the real world reads specs. The best you can hope for is
that they will buy your books. The safest assumption is that real
world users will follow the advice of someone who can distill the
whole issue down to a sound bite, like maybe: "XML namespaces are
prefixes that map to URLs, what's really important is the URL rather
than the prefix." If that sound bite is the basis for someone's
experience with the namespace spec, and they hear the various horror
stories about the way that the combination of namespace prefixes with
DOM and/or XPath can confuse you horribly, then this makes sense:
Just put the URL in your markup vocabulary, pay the price in
verbosity, and the conceptual hassles go away. (Of course, there's
the detail that '/' is not a name character, but people are used to
using '.' all the way down, a la Java).
And yes, I agree with anyone who points out that a) this sucks and b)
applying this decision making style to voting and purchasing produces
the kind of political and economic situation that we have in the
West.
Maybe I can set myself up as the Rush Limbaugh of the technology
world and make a fortune dispensing outrageously oversimplified
sound bites :~)
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