RE: guidelines on usage of namespaces

[David RR Webber <Gnosis_@compuserve.com>]

Message text written by Bob Miller
>David Webber has a solution revolving around xlink in the dtd.  His
approach may be more sensible.
MILR:  I've seen some of this stuff.  My first reaction was 'neat, but
sounds resource expensive'.  Worth keeping an eye on though.

<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<

Ooops - my eagle eye spotted this reference - and of course I'm here to
tell you right way that this will all come FREE with the next releases of
the
parsers that will fully support the XLink spec', especially if they do it
right
and also support native http date/time stamp query and
local caching in the regular internet cache system on either client or
server (OK, OK, I lost most people there except people that write parser 
code and tinker with browsers at low-levels for a living).

Bottom line - give this another 3 months and will be able to demo' 
this live for people and show how seamlessly simple it is because
all the hardwork will be done by Microsofts or Netscapes or Apaches
code that's already out there by the millions.

BTW - You can already do some of this at the DTD fragment level right now,
with plain vanilla XML 1.0, and of course X2X are shipping an XLink toolkit

if you want to write Java to do it with.

So - what's my take on namespaces?   Use them extremely sparingly,
and ONLY when absolutely necessary to avoid element name clashes.
Even when element name clashes occur - they can often be benign
provided you reference the name uniquely by context within the XML
structure.  It would be interesting to have someone provide an 
example of an element naming clash that they really encountered.
My suspicion right now is that this is NOT a real-world scenario that
anyone has really hit.  But since Microsoft and Office2000 use 
o: p: x: w: , now EVERYONE else thinks they have to get into the
act. (Notice despite using namespaces Word2000 still writes out
no-validating XML - sheesh, so THAT fact should be getting centre
stage not the namespaces!)

DW.