Re: [xml-dev] To namespace or not to Namespace ....

[Stephen Green <stephengreenubl@gmail.com>]

The strongest antipathy in this thread against namespaces and prefixes
seems to be from those considering people actually seeing and editing
the raw XML but surely the real problems are for those writing code to
handle the XML if it contains multiple prefixes / namespaces. Then there
is likely to be a real attempt to remove the prefixes by first converting the
XML into something without them before writing all the real code - so as to
avoid code-maintenance nightmares.

---

Stephen D Green

On 7 April 2010 19:26, Andrew Welch <andrew.j.welch@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 7 April 2010 18:28, Liam R E Quin <liam@w3.org> wrote:
...
>> All this is not to say that namespaces have no use. But they are used
>> much more often than they are needed, they are wanted less often still,
>> and they are ineffective at solving many of the problems people often
>> expect them to solve.
>>
>> If you put prefixes on all your elements in case someone wants them,
>> the chances are every bit as high that someone else will need to take
>> them all off again. There's no single future-proof answer for all
>> environments.
>
> What do you mean when you say "someone else will need to take them all
> off again" ?
>
> The choice seems to be:
>
> a) If you use the proper tools to process the XML and the developers
> doing the processing know a little about XML... If so then using a
> namespace (with prefix) is a good idea
>
> or
>
> b) You process the XML with something like PHP, and the majority of
> the developers think XML is just like HTML... it's just angle brackets
> after all... they create it by concatenating strings and read it using
> regexes.  If so, then you should avoid namespaces completely (and also
> avoid entity refs, and numeric refs, and stick to ascii etc...)
>
>