Re: Summary of critiques of XML Namespace from comments to James Clark 2

[ht@markup.co.uk (Henry S. Thompson)]

Rick Jelliffe <rjelliffe@allette.com.au> writes:

> ...

> *Rick: *Setting default namespaces and nested or local declarations and
> redeclarations work against "manifest markup" where you only need to look
> at the tag (and perhaps a header) to know what is going on. I appreciate
> that it was a useful mechanism for, e.g. pulling in HTML documents into
> XHTML without having to prefix every element name in a tag or mess up CSS
> stylesheets; however perhaps XHTML was really a one-off, and not so
> compelling now.

I would cautiously observe that many 'simple' languages had thought
they didn't need a name-collision avoidance mechanism, and then had to
patch one on if/when they got successful and they started to be used
for large and/or collaborative efforts.

You only need to look at the industrial-scale XML applications such as
ebXML, UBL, RosettaNet, DITA or even ooXML to see examples of this
(some better than others, of course).

It's hard to do requirements capture after the fact, since what you
find, in the above examples and elsewhere, was of course influenced by
the mechanisms they had available.  But _unless_ you study those
example and many others, you risk falling foul of one of the most
perilous addictions of the software developer: premature optimisation.

ht
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