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

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If you want to be technical, then, yes, just about anything I might want to
do "requires" namespaces, by virtue of the fact that I like to use recent
DOM implementation, XSLT, and other software that "requires" namespaces.
But my own application has no requirement, need, or care, and frankly,
doesn't have to be aware of them at all.  I can parse, serialize, edit,
manipulate, fold, spindle and mutilate XML documents to a great degree
without every coming near namespaces, and do consider myself lucky to be
able to do so, but that is also in part by my own design.

I suppose you could say that it is namespace aware by virtue of the fact
that I purposefully do not use any namespace aware APIs in my code, and so
therefore have to be aware of namespaces to know what to avoid, but that
seems to miss the point.  If you put nsgarbage: in front of my applications
markup, my application breaks.

So, I guess my question is then, how is my application namespace aware?

	Keith


-----Original Message-----
From: Tom Bradford [mailto:bradford@dbxmlgroup.com]
Sent: Monday, September 09, 2002 2:54 PM
To: keith@woc.org
Cc: xml-dev@lists.xml.org
Subject: Re: [xml-dev] Shouldn't colon be reserved?


On Monday, September 9, 2002, at 11:05 AM, Keith W. Boone wrote:
> According to Tom Bradford:
>> But let's be honest.  Very few applications, perhaps only those that
>> have lived in a vacuum since 1997, can get by without having to be
>> namespace aware.  Just about anything that a person might actually want
>> to *do* with or to a document requires namespaces.
>
> That's a blanket statement.  It may hold true for some, but certainly
> not
> all users of XML.  I regularly develop applications using XML that have
> no a
> priori requirement to deal with namespaces.  There are a large number of
> developers like me who use XML for purposes like serialization of data
> structures, or marking up text documents, that could care less about
> them.

I don't think it's a blanket statement at all.  Any application that
utilizes any specification developed by the W3C over the past few years,
other than XML 1.0 itself, must, even if you don't care, be
namespace-aware.  This is what I mean by 'all the stuff that you might
want to *do* with or to a document'.  If an application developer can
live happily only having to parse and serialize non-namespaced data,
then they should consider themselves lucky.

> It is ridiculous to assume that everyone needs or requires namespaces,
> and
> I'm glad its an optional part of XML.

Who said that I believe everyone needs and/or requires namespaces?
Personally, I avoid them like the plague.  They present API layerings
that I'd much rather live without.

--
Tom Bradford - CTO - The dbXML Group - http://www.dbxml.com
Apache Xindice (XML Database) - http://xml.apache.org/xindice
Labrador (Web Services Hub) - http://www.notdotnet.org/labrador


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