Re: [xml-dev] Pragmatic namespaces

['Liam Quin' <liam@w3.org>]

On Thu, Aug 06, 2009 at 12:45:09AM +0100, Michael Kay wrote:
> > also, it can't 
> > easily be made compatible with things like ch.cern.html 
> > (later org.ietf.html, and then org.w3.html, of course, and 
> > also ch.iso.html...)
> 
> That's not fair.
Hey! Why do I have to be fair? :-)

> The current namespace scheme can't handle variants of a
> vocabulary at all well,
No, it doesn't, although at least you don't have to change element names
if a namespace URI changes.

I'm very much in favour of improving namespaces.  Tim's
suggested approach might mean that existing namespace
mechanisms in XSLT, Xpath, XQuery, etc etc., could be largely
ignored by programmers & users, except at least for already-existing
content, and for that maybe some sort of API change might be
sufficient.

So far I don't think I've seen a single clear all-round winner in
terms of suggested improvements, but indeed something new doesn't
have to improve in all ways.

Liam


-- 
Liam Quin, W3C XML Activity Lead, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
http://www.holoweb.net/~liam/ * http://www.fromoldbooks.org/