At 2007-11-29 12:18 +0000, Andrew Welch wrote:
Oddly enough every company seems to like to put their XML into a
namespace which represents their company, regardless of whether the
XML will come into contact with any other XML during it's life. I've
even seen things like:
<comp:someElem>
<xhtml:p>some text <xhtml:p> some more </xhtml:p></xhtml:p>
</comp:someElem>
...where its thought the "presentational" markup should be separate
from the the business markup. All nonsense as it just causes problems
down the line and doesn't add anything at all to the XML... and once
its been used like this for a while the cost/time to change it
outweighs just putting up with it.
If I may cite where making this distinction is very important:
standards development. I'm working on code-list-related
specifications and the namespace distinction of foreign namespaces is
critically important to validate those standardized constructs with
adopted community-wide semantics, while distinguishing embedded
documentation constructs that are important to individual users.
If one user chooses XHTML to document their XML code list
representation and another user chooses DocBook and yet another user
uses DITA, all three users can agree on the community-standard
structural constraints of the standardized vocabulary without having
their respective vocabularies interfere.
I feel namespaces are unjustly given a bad rap and that they play a
critically-important role in information design.
I agree with you Andrew that using a globally-unique naming
convention for a closed vocabulary (as in one used by a closed
community of users where everything is mandated under central
control) can be overkill, but I see no harm and only benefit in
distinguishing using namespaces the documentary constructs
unimportant to the semantics of the information being acted on.
I hope this is considered helpful.
. . . . . . . . . . . Ken
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