Re: Namespaces, the universe, and everything

Tim Bray writes:

> >Perhaps in a future revision process DTDs will transmogrify, and
> >son-of-8879 will have a much more ambitious world-view as to what
> >constitutes a markup declaration.  In the meantime, these guys are
> >convinced that they need namespaces and they need them well-defined
> >by Q4 '97, and we shouldn't tell them that they can't have them.

Well, then *this* is the fundamental requirement, then, isn't it?

I buy David Durand's plea for a conservative approch to the namespaces
issue. 

Wouldn't it be possible to enable the ":" to be added to XML names, and
then enable namespaces themselves at the "application specific
instructions level"-equivalent in XML, which I would take to be a set of
processing instructions in the Misc section of the Prolog? 

That way, the Q4 guys are happy, experimentation with namespaces can
proceed apace, and any failures wouldn't bring XML or SGML down.
(Actually, the worse case scenario in my mind is where XML is *not* SGML
-- but is marketed as if it were....)

Received on Friday, 20 June 1997 00:22:18 UTC