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

On 7 April 2010 21:38, Uche Ogbuji <uche@ogbuji.net> wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 7, 2010 at 2:33 PM, Andrew Welch <andrew.j.welch@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>>
>> > I just hope people will actually evaluate the costs of using namespaces
>> > before automatically sticking them on everything.
>>
>> You can't go far wrong if:
>>
>> - You pick a namespace that will never change: don't use dates, or
>> words like 'proposed' or 'beta', or embed version information
>> - You always use a prefix
>> - You tell the team to always use an XML parser to read the XML, and
>> an XML writer to serialise the XML, and never ever process XML as a
>> string
>
>
> Ha!� Just Ha!
>
> You probably need to add about 100 items to your list.

Come on then, list them, it all helps.

I don't have the time to re-hash the thousands of messages on this list, which would easily yield you your list of 100, nor the thousands of messages on the W3C list that was set up to address the issues of syntax/semantic for namespace URLs, which would easily give you another 100.� I regret that I have an full work day.� You have the list archives.

David Lee already gave you a flavor of what you're over-simplifying.� I'll just give you a few general areas to ponder:

* QNames in content will easily give you a dozen or so items to add to your list
* Namespace usage "sanity" (i.e. the joe English classification) will easily give you a dozen or so items to add to your list
* Pitfalls of buggy or inconsistent tools will easily give you a dozen or so items to add to your list (including consideration of handling of null-namespace attrivutes)
* Namespace URI as text versus identifier/locator will easily give you a few dozen or so items to add to your list, including the subsidiary problem of what happens when someone tries to "resolve" a namespace URI, and when other specs mandate this
* And you can probably multiplex all the above against the multiple revisions of the namespace spec itself.