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[David Megginson]
> So far, we don't know, because most of this discussion is
> hypothetical. XML is scarcely used at all for widespread publication
> of documents or data -- most XML projects are in-house or inside a
> small set of exchange partners. The few examples of widespread XML,
> like RSS and the Linux Documentation Project, are narrowly confined to
> a specific vocabulary.
>
I have been involved with a schema for a standard that makes use of about
five other standards by importing their schemas. We are using a different
namespace for importing each of them. These other standards are being
developed by unrelated organizations. Each one is complicated in its own
right. Each one is developed using a different conceptual model and a
different concept of operations.
It often happens that one needs to look up some particular structure to find
out more about it. So one needs to know where it came from. This is
especially important for
elements that contain an ungodly number of enumerated choices, which is the
case in this work.
The namespace tells immediately which schema is in play. Annotation
elements (this is XML Schema, so it has them) could be used, but they do not
always exist. Without namespaces, it would be nearly impossible to find out
where things came from. You would have to build an index by reading all the
schema imports (assuming no name conflicts), and refer to the index whenever
you wanted to look up information about an element.
But with namespaces, you know at once. This is much better, and is one of
the reasons that I recommended that we use namespaces in this task.
Cheers,
Tom P
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