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   Re: [xml-dev] Shouldn't colon be reserved?

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On Mon, Sep 09, 2002 at 10:12:13AM -0700, Dare Obasanjo wrote:
> I used to think everyone that uses XML today must be using namespaces
> until I took a closer look around and noticed this was just how I used
> XML. For example anyone using RSS 0.9x doesn't use namespaces (then
> again some of them aren't aren't even really using XML but I digress)
> similarly I've seen quite a few of widespread config and documentation
> file formats that don't use namespaces either.

  We come from very different worlds, but I agree with you. Even
in the free software community I come from, a lot of people simply
don't bother with Namespaces, either they don't think they
need to exchange document with other frameworks (config files),
or for legacy reasons (DocBook), or because namespace don't make
much easier to guess what application or libraries should be used to
handle a specific XML file (file browser like Nautilus struggled with
that) or simply they sometime make the job harder (simply adding xmlns=""
on top of a document make all the XPath queries to search them 10 times
more complex). Not that Namespaces in XML 1.0 didn't reach the goals it
tried to attain, but it didn't make the job that easy and simple that 
it became ubiquitous. Still, I think it's a good spec :-)

Daniel

-- 
Daniel Veillard      | Red Hat Network https://rhn.redhat.com/
veillard@redhat.com  | libxml GNOME XML XSLT toolkit  http://xmlsoft.org/
http://veillard.com/ | Rpmfind RPM search engine http://rpmfind.net/




 

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