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




On Tue, Nov 26, 2013 at 5:22 PM, David Lee <dlee@calldei.com> wrote:
> Michael Kay
> When you've crawled to the top of the mountain on your hands and knees, and when you see others struggling to make the same journey, do you say "I got here, it wasn't that difficult", > or do you say "There must be a better way"?

It was never that huge a deal for me ,but I never went into the nooks and crannies you did :)
Maybe I just forgot how hard it was to get to the (near) top.

In the end ... yes there must be a better way, but I dont want to build the next mountain.
This mountain is hard to climb, but harder to build.  And simply leveling it to a plane(plain?) e.,g. tossing namespaces, doesnt really solve the problems IMHO.
Especially now that I live in the cave of XML Databases, having Namespaces is quite a useful thing.
Do I wish they were simpler ? Hell yes.  DO I want them gone ? Hell No.

In a Database of a billion XML documents, being able to say "index only THIS variant of 'title'" is really a nice thing to do.

I think the metaphor is that XMLNS is less the mountain (i.e. multiplicity of vocabulary, or if you prefer, tower of babel) and more the mechanism used to negotiate the mountain (i.e. on hands & knees, though I'd personally say on hands and knees with a bed of nails strapped to one's back).

So no no one needs to reconstruct the mountain. Human history has done a great job of that already. But just look at what you said in the last para. What database technology have you seen other than XML that uses such an arcane, unreliable, inscrutable, edge-case ridden mechanism to just say "index one type of field and not another that coincidentally looks a lot like it"? There are numerous ways to solve that problem, including many less ridiculous than XMLNS.


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