Re: [xml-dev] HTML5 and almost no namespaces

[Michael Kay <mike@saxonica.com>]

On 02/06/2011 11:44, Mukul Gandhi wrote:
> With due respects to people who dislike XML namespaces,
>
> Consider the following example:
>
> The element "name" here represents an organization name.
>
> <name xmlns="http://organization-ns";>ABC corp</name>
>
> The element "name" here represents a person name.
>
> <name xmlns="http://person-ns";>Jill Doe</name>
>
> If I'm presented with either (or both) of these documents, the
> namespace binding helps me (and my XML application) to make a logical
> association between the XML markup and to the domain with which it is
> related to.
>
> And we all say that, XML namespaces helps us to avoid name collisions
> (one of the example of this is given above).
>
> I (therefore) personally like XML namespaces. It's an optional
> feature. If someone doesn't need XML namespaces in an application, the
> XML software stack allows implementing such a design decision.
>

You're saying you like namespaces because they are a solution to a real 
problem.

But the objection to namespaces is not that there is no problem to be 
solved, it is that namespaces (as currently defined) are a bad solution 
to that problem; they introduce far too much complexity in relation to 
the size of the problem. Far simpler solutions are available to allow 
names to be disambiguated.

Michael Kay
Saxonica