Re: [xml-dev] A question of necessity

[Alexander Johannesen <alexander.johannesen@gmail.com>]

Arjun Ray <arjun.ray@verizon.net> wrote:
>
> Materially implied; sine qua non.
>

Unfortunately that doesn't answer the question. That's just defining
what necessary means technically, not what it means in our context. By
such a vague approach I can say anything, and you can shrug it off as
not truly necessary. We're talking bitsy and complex systems here
where anything goes; no matter how one argues, the other can shrug it
off, and we'll get nowhere.

So what I'm really after is what you mean with necessary in the
context of namespaces in XML. Anything I can think of, I can do it
differently without namespaces. But the same applies to attributes. To
entities. To whitespace nodes. To Unicode support and encodings. To
CDATA. Lack of empty-element tags. To angle brackets. And on and on.

> | I work in templating environments where support for similar things
> | are distinguished by namespaces.
>
> Sounds like an attribute could have done the job.

Again; you're the keeper of the definition of 'necessary'. What's
necessary for me clearly isn't necessary to you.

An attribute isn't as good a solution as a namespace to keep mixed
content models sane. They're awesome for separation of domains and
concerns. In our case, without it makes for less flexible are more
verbose code. Is that necessary enough, though?

> | Necessary? I *can* live without them. But they're awfully handy in
> | what I do.
>
> Yes, toolsets matter.  But that wasn't the question, of course.

Maybe restate the question? I don't understand what you mean by 'necessary.'


Cheers,

Alex
-- 
 Information Alchemist / UX badass / GUI wrangler for hire
 http://thinkplot.org     |  http://www.linkedin.com/in/shelterit