Following up ... a "Living without W3C Namespaces" manifesto?

[Mike Champion <mc@xegesis.org>]

In http://lists.xml.org/archives/xml-dev/200305/msg00891.html
Tim Bray makes the point "Anyhow, write it all down, post it or submit it 
to a conference or something, and see whether you can start a revolution.  
To improve your chances, identify some working software that implements 
your approach."  Seems like a good idea to me.

So, what about a collective effort to write down, with worked examples, 
what end users can do to avoid the pain that the W3C namespaces spec 
imposes without suffering from "name collision" or whatever?  There have 
been some awfully good points made in this thread, and it would be great to 
see them summarized and elaborated upon in something like an XML.com 
article. I especially like Sean's "The element structure of XML is a 
simple, elegant way of contextualising chunks of text.  XPath etc. give you 
techniques for interacting with that context." Of course, any software that 
implements XPath can implement this approach, so it's not like there is a 
lot of coding to do.

So, what's a manageable, realistic problem that could be used to illustrate 
how a conventional "universal name" approach to processing and a "local 
name in context" approach to processing compare and contrast?

And what are some of the guidelines such an article might offer ...

- Incorporate Joe English's [?] sane, psychotic, borderline advice ...
- "Strip out everything in one namespace and process it without namespaces"
- Use XPath or a tree API to figure out the element context of an 
unqualified name ...
- ???

Thoughts?


-- 
Mike Champion