Re: widget namespace

> To me, it is glaringly obvious that a standards organization should
> leverage whatever tools are available to ensure that the technologies it
> defines are robust and extensible. In the realm of angle-bracket markup
> languages, the relevant tools are XML namespaces along with a proper schema
> definition using XML Schema or RelaxNG. These XML tools prevent ambiguities
> in the language definition and provide a clear definition of extensibility
> points for both the language design committee (W3C in this case) and 3rd
> parties who need to add their own elements and attributes due to the special
> requirements of their workflows. (Note that HTML/HTML5 is a special case
> where the world has gone through a hugely expensive and inefficient process
> of recreating quirks found in leading implementations in order to achieve a
> reasonably useful defacto standard.)
>
Agreed.

> My primary reason for recommending the use of namespaces and schema is
> mainly from a language design perspective. It's the proper way to design
> languages. However, that doesn't mean that clients have to enforce all or
> any of the formal language mechanisms. For example, it is unusual that
> clients perform validation. The big question is whether to require
> well-formedness checks in the client. I would recommend yes because I don't
> think we want to launch another decades-long effort to cross-replicate the
> quirks from other widget clients. Widget designers are capable of learning
> that they need to use quotes on attributes and have close tags for every
> start tag versus all of the other things they need to learn to create a
> widget.
>
> Thanks for asking.
>

Thanks for responding. The spec again reads:

[..
Configuration document
A configuration document is an [XML] document that has a widget element at
its root.
The namespace of all the configuration document elements must be:
http://www.w3.org/ns/widgets
..]

Kind regards,
-- 
Marcos Caceres
http://datadriven.com.au