Re: [syndication] Re: Thoughts, questions, and issues.

[Ken MacLeod <ken@bitsko.slc.ut.us>]

"Paulo Gaspar" <Paulo.Gaspar@krankikom.de> writes:

> Thinks like namespaces still can cause headaches to many people

Why? is it the concept or a lack of support in the tools available to
those people?

I was working with my daughter recently and needed to introduce
namespaces to her for some similar stuff.  She's fairly comfortable
with using namespaces now (in schemas others design), only after about
10-15 minutes of describing them.  She's familiar with Java, so the
usage of DOM with namespaces was straightforward extension of that.
We've been working with Python more recently, and the tools for
namespaces in Python will soon be even easier than DOM.

I do understand that using namespaces is (merely) incrementally more
difficult than without, and that designing properly with them somewhat
harder (and easy to get wrong, witness SOAP), but I don't understand
the wholesale, digging the heels in, absolutism against it.  RSS1.0p
has about the most sensible usage of namespaces I've seen recently.
What, exactly, are people having headaches about with namespaces in
RSS1.0p?  "Namespaces are hard" is not an answer that covers this
instance, give a concrete example with RSS1.0p, let's see the code.

We've also yet to hear a *single* alternate proposal that allows for
interoperable, decentralized extension of an XML document.  So far,
the only alternates proposed are to run it through a committe to
approve (centralized) or "do whatever you want because it's optional
and other processors will ignore it if they don't understand" (which
doesn't solve the nameclash problem).

  -- Ken