Fw: New Message: Re: xml namespaces

["Dave Winer" <dave@userland.com>]

----- Original Message -----
From: <webmaster@userland.com>
To: <userland-internal@userland.com>
Sent: Thursday, June 29, 2000 8:09 PM
Subject: New Message: Re: xml namespaces


> A new message was posted:
>
> Address: http://discuss.userland.com/msgReader$18281
>
> By: Dan Lyke (danlyke@flutterby.com)
>
> At first I thought XML namespaces were annoying and superfluous. After
working with XML for a little bit, I've come to see the wisdom of them.
>
> The issue, it seems to me, is that XML developers mostly see XML as a
better alternative to comma delimited flat files for data exchange. I hope
for more out of the XML, I'd like to see it used as a real markup language,
just as I'd hoped that people would adopt the semantic markup tags in HTML
rather than the appearance based ones. Alas, everyone seems to have
forgotten that &lt;cite&gt; and its ilk ever existed.
>
> To take a recent use case, I was walking down the street, talking with a
colleague about the Open Source conference. We were discussing what looked
interesting on the schedule, so I popped up the browser on my OmniSky
enhanced Palm and opened the web page. It would have been really cool had I
been able to say "add this page's schedule information to my calendar".
>
> In implementing this &uuml;ber web we seem to have two choices:
>
> <ol><li>Build an XML replacement for HTML that allows us to embed all the
semantic information in the documents, and make it comprehensive enough to
cover all possible applications.</li><li>Use namespaces so that savvy
developers can use whatever XML/XSL systems they want for formatting, and
use the appropriate definitions for the semantic content</li></ol>
>
> Given that we can't get web "designers" to abandon appearance for the sake
of semantic content enough to use the original semantic markup tags that
have been present in HTML since the very beginning, I'm guessing that the
former option isn't gonna happen any time soon. However, if I can say to web
publishers "hey, put some &lt;mynamespace:starttime&gt; and
&lt;mynamespace:endtime&gt; tags around the dates in your page and users of
my browser/plug-in/whatever will get enhanced functionality from your page",
there's a possibility that we might actually see some real <em>useful</em>
markup happening.
>
> But, ya know, useful content on the web is such a last century idea.
>
>