Re: [xml-dev] How to design XML to have broad utility and yet alsoenable

[John Cowan <johnwcowan@gmail.com>]

On Thu, Nov 21, 2013 at 4:23 PM, David Lee <dlee@calldei.com> wrote:

 

but in the end ... is it really harder than in java having to do

    System.out.println("Hello World");

when in C I could do :
    printf("hello World\n");

Yes.

 

In the end I dont find namespaces a big deal.
You either use them and learn them, or you dont and you dont.
If your job is being forced to suck in XML that has namespaces then you learn how to use them.
If not you blissfully ignore them.

In $EMPLOYER's schema development group, to which I belong, we use namespaces extensively, hundreds of them, in the schemas we publish to internal (mostly) and external (a few) customers.  We also have one namespace that we use ourselves, for adding annotations to the schemas we develop.  It's basically a simple rich-text schema with some additional elements like <element-name> and <attribute-name>.

Well, I did an analysis a while back of all the schemas we had published so far.  It turned out that the namespace URI for this private namespace existed in 12 different incompatible variants.  If we, the schema creators, can't get it right, what hope is there for anyone else?

 

Writing good software takes work, there is no holy grail of "No Code Needed" or "No Brain Needed".

No, but there's such a thing as gratuitous difficulty.

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