Re: [xml-dev] A question of necessity

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

On Fri, 22 Apr 2016 08:33:17 -0400, Steve Newcomb <srn@coolheads.com>
wrote:

| Having been impaled on this "RDF needs colonified names" windmill many 
| years ago,

Actually, those many years ago, it was "RDF needs colonified names by
yesterday".  

A truly unconscionable amouht of time and effort[*] of many good
people was wasted on this one silly issue, which could have been used
for more productive (and I dare say, pressing) matters. Some obvious
howlers in the XML 1.0 spec never got addressed, for example.

[*] I once did a rough count of the messages in the old SIG list (i.e.
the second year, Jul 1997 to Sep 1998, still under wraps at the W3C)
on XML namespaces.  The proportion came out to be about 45%.  Yup.

| [...] but I also find the discussion of "How do we get out of this 
| mess" a bit, uh,  quixotic. [...] As a matter of history, the HyTime 
| solution came first, it was loudly deprecated and misrepresented by 
| W3C leaders, and it was effectively scuttled in the marketplace.  
| Were they right to take that approach?  Who cares?  They won, didn't 
| they?

For what value of "won"?

"Getting out of this mess" starts with not digging the holes any
deeper.  The cost of simply desisting from using colonified names
going forward is maintenance of the legacy data.  Some of that will
obsolesce, and the rest can be converted to saner representations over
time.  Yes, it's a cost, but the benefit to offset it is also in the
future: simpler, saner processing.

But does it have to be HyTime?  Not as is, I don't think.  We can get
a lot of mileage out of one crucial idea from  HyTime: attribute-based
processing.  That might be enough.  Start simple and keep it simple! 
 
| Maybe now it's becoming OK to discuss this.  Maybe now W3C will even 
| explain its summary judgment of architectural forms as "too ugly". Or, 
| maybe not.

I think we should leave the W3C out of this.