Re: [xml-dev] Lessons learned from the XML experiment

[Michael Kay <mike@saxonica.com>]

On 14 Nov 2013, at 13:46, Hans-Juergen Rennau <hrennau@yahoo.de> wrote:

Michael Kay wrote:

"Namespaces account for a very significant chunk of user difficulties with XML, a great deal of the complexity of specifications like XSD and XSLT, a similar proportion of the complexity of APIs, and a vast amount of the code in implementations of these specs. And they aren't necessary! The world could have managed perfectly well with a convention where the element name <org.w3c.svg> means "in this subtree, I'm using SVG element names"."

Michael, you are not serious, are you? Would you suggest that users start to parse names and, depending on whether the name string matches some "convention", infer that something means an apple, rather than a pear?

Yes, I am serious. Programmers have no difficulty with the idea that data.xml is a different file depending on what directory it is in, or that Logger is a different Java class depending on what package it is in; they would have no difficulty understanding that <title> within an SVG context means something different from <title> in a MathML context, where the context is defined by an ancestor element. This would be vastly easier to cope with than the current namespace machinery. The vast majority of users would never have to worry about it because most documents use a single vocabulary, so unlike namespaces it would impose no complexity cost on users who don't need it.

(But I'm not seriously suggesting that I can change the world, if that's what you mean: there's a difference between knowing where you want to be and knowing how to get there).

Michael Kay

Saxonica