A question of necessity

[Arjun Ray <arjun.ray@verizon.net>]

On Mon, 18 Apr 2016 14:59:39 +0000, "Evain, Jean-Pierre"
<evain@ebu.ch> wrote:
| From: Michael Kay [mike@saxonica.com]

| > The "matter" is that XML and its programming APIs are excessively 
| > complex. [...] Namespaces are a very significant component of this 
| > excess complexity.

| I personally do not face that sort of problems [...]  One of the 
| dangers of xml is that you can end up with complex data structures 
| if you are not careful. For me this is more the issue. [...]  So 
| I'd like to know more about the development environment where you 
| meet these problems.

Leaving aside the question of whether processing XML is inherently
complex, there is no doubt that using XML namespaces introduces (more)
complexity.  (E.g., XPath expressions!)

Are they worth the extra cost?  

Turn this around, and consider: *why* use XML Namespaces?  For what
problem(s) are they the correct solution?

In other words, can you formulate a use case where the syntactic
device of colonified names - and the processing burden that comes with
it - is necessary?

Could it be worthwhile to investigate how such use cases could be
addressed without any new syntax?  (Think SAX 1.x and XPath 1.0, for
example.) 

I think this blast from the past might help.  Here are three posts to
the comp.text.sgml newsgroup from February 1998 (a time when the XML
SIG and WG were still extant).  Reading the third first is okay too.

https://groups.google.com/d/msg/comp.text.sgml/sMADjGyC0R4/gSoVLO495cMJ
https://groups.google.com/d/msg/comp.text.sgml/sMADjGyC0R4/AOdQtnqC2kcJ
https://groups.google.com/d/msg/comp.text.sgml/sMADjGyC0R4/LgYWqML4XwMJ