Re: [xml-dev] ten years later, time to repeat it?

["Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@simonstl.com>]

Pete Cordell wrote:
> The namespace problems are often mentioned.  Are there any pointers to 
> how, with the benefit of hindsight / no baggage, XML 1.0 + namespaces 
> should have been done?

URIs are the cause of much of the theory pain - specifying a smaller 
mechanism without the heavy baggage (and promises) that URIs carry would 
have been helpful.

I'm not thrilled about the declaration syntax, but that's one case where 
I haven't really found a better option.

In any case, my proposal is _just_ subsetting, not redesign.  Redesign 
is, I think anyway, better done through developing a new spec, under a 
different name, etc.  (See JSON for one example.)

> (Certainly from a databinding point of view it would be nice if the 
> worst-case number of characters you had to look-ahead to work out the 
> namespace of an element (or attribute) could be predictable.)

Personally, I'd call that a severe case of over-optimization.  If people 
are sending you documents with namespace prefixes that are more than 20 
characters long, something wacky has gone wrong.

> P.S. If we're looking for features, how about an xml:type attribute 
> rather than having to use xsi:type?

Wow - now that's precisely the kind of potential disaster I'm hoping to 
avoid by focusing on the layer _below_ schemas.  Let's _not_ look for 
new features.

Thanks,
Simon St.Laurent
Retired XML troublemaker
http://simonstl.com/