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

[Peter Hunsberger <peter.hunsberger@gmail.com>]

On Fri, Jul 10, 2009 at 12:04 PM, Michael Kay<mike@saxonica.com> wrote:
> I think it would have been better not to have prefixes at all. They cause a
> lot of the complexity in the model. Declare all the namespaces, perhaps with
> document scope, and perhaps allowing the "document type" to define the set
> of namespaces implicitly; require each namespace to have a definition that
> defines all the local names present in the namespace; require any reference
> to a name that's present in more than one of the namespaces to be explicitly
> qualified with the namespace name. And then use shorter namespace names,
> along the lines of Java package names, so that writing the full name is
> typically 40 characters rather than 120.
>

Sounds good, except, how do you know what element names are possibly
in more than one namespace?  Even for static documents you could
potentially have 1000's of elements to check.  For dynamically created
documents you'll need some kind of pre-merge type phase.  If users end
up qualifying everything with the namespace name just in case their
data is merged with something else I don't think you've made anything
any better?  I guess a rule like children default to the name space of
the parent would help, but for long but shallow documents this still
could end up very verbose if people just take the safest way out?

-- 
Peter Hunsberger