a simple convention for hygenic names anticipating namespaces (Re: A few thoughts)

> From: David Durand <dgd@cs.bu.edu>

> Finally, given that SGML itself has great
> utility without namespaces, it seems unnecessary to rush into
> something that we do not fully understand.

Can I suggest an intemediate path?

That is to make the convention in XML 1.0  that "::" is a namespace
or inheritance separator in names, but to refrain from defining a namespace mechanism yet.

When a namespace mechanism is finally agreed on, then it might be possible
to minimise away the LHS namespace names, by some scoping rule, but for XML 1.0
the full names should be used.

And in the mean time, it will allow experiments in various namespace mechanisms
without making the names incomplete (though they may have to be trivially
touched up if the eventual syntax changes to CONCUR-like or URI-like or whatever)
or making the document vendor-specific.  And it allows a simple way to convert
element sets in the interim: e.g. with simple sed scripts like
	s/table/CALS::table/g


Rick Jelliffe

Received on Thursday, 12 June 1997 02:48:19 UTC