>
> The one truly horrible thing about namespaces is the horrible
> convention adopted of making them way too complicated for the
> eyeball to parse easily with no obvious benefit at all. (And
> not even hidden benefits, I think.)
I agree that's one of the problems, and fixing it would actually require no
change to the specs, just a change in working practices. (I think this
philosophy of "every identifier must be a URI", coupled with "URIs should
begin with 'http://', is one of the worst things to come out of W3C). But
there are plenty of other problems, notably the impact of namespace
declarations on the data model (in-scope prefix bindings need to be retained
in the data model just in case anyone happens to be using prefixes in
element or attribute content.)
Regards,
Michael Kay
http://www.saxonica.com/
http://twitter.com/michaelhkay
