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Problem is, a coach that doesn't know how and when
to pick the best players hasn't a prayer of winning.
Does anyone else find it discomfiting that the question
of version numbers and namespaces was raised some time
ago and was dismissed without resolution? We either
have a lousy learning curve in this community or we
are very good at postponing proposing a solution to
a problem until we are a few hundreds yards from
the iceberg, and even then, momentum affects outcomes.
Not to pick on either of you, but this is illuminating
when posted on the same day:
Rick Jeliffe: " All a namespace does is set general semantics."
David Carlisle: "Namespaces are not about semantics they are about names."
I know the arguments on each side of this. It still comes down
to expectations of interpretive communities. The lack of
consistent observable behavior given two interpretations of
the same code system is the classic definition of the failure
to communicate. I think it time to put away the distraction
that something with a protocol morph appended to the front
of it is just a name. That is irrelevant if the framework
does not give the author a choice about the operator that
can be applied to any value with that name.
I really don't care if one does or does not dereference a
namespace value. It is useful to do that and obvious. I
do care that given one, I cannot divine the intent. That's
just dumb design. SGML avoided it. The WWW embraces it
like hemlock and expects everyone else to. Dumb. Just dumb.
URI != URL. An abstraction that leads to an ambiguity of
this type simply isn't useful globally. It is as if one
is programming in a language that requires all variables
to be declared in scope and forgets that every use
of i in a for loop increment stomps every other use of it.
j != i
len
From: Michael Fitzgerald [mailto:mike@wyeast.net]
Delayed reply:
Other lessons are that XML and related specs must evolve and that the best
players don't always get picked and as Knute Rockne said "Prayer always
works better best when you have big players" (paraphrase).
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