RE: [xml-dev] XHTML 2 Working Group won't be renewed?

["Michael Kay" <mike@saxonica.com>]

> 
> The one truly horrible thing about namespaces is the horrible 
> convention adopted of making them way too complicated for the 
> eyeball to parse easily with no obvious benefit at all. (And 
> not even hidden benefits, I think.)

I agree that's one of the problems, and fixing it would actually require no
change to the specs, just a change in working practices. (I think this
philosophy of "every identifier must be a URI", coupled with "URIs should
begin with 'http://', is one of the worst things to come out of W3C). But
there are plenty of other problems, notably the impact of namespace
declarations on the data model (in-scope prefix bindings need to be retained
in the data model just in case anyone happens to be using prefixes in
element or attribute content.) 

Regards,

Michael Kay
http://www.saxonica.com/
http://twitter.com/michaelhkay