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

["Pete Cordell" <petexmldev@codalogic.com>]

Original Message From: "Simon St.Laurent"
> 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.

Aren't the URIs effectively just strings as far as namespaces are concerned? 
Would it really solve any problems to use some other from of unique string?

> ...
>
>> (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.

The case I'm considering here is when you have:

<foo:myElement
    ... 1 billion attributes ...
    xmlns:foo="http://...";>
    <etc>...

For example, it would help if all the xmlns attributes must go before the 
other attributes.  (Followed by xsi: ones and then the rest!)

Cheers,

Pete Cordell
Codalogic
Visit http://www.codalogic.com/lmx/ for XML C++ data binding