Re: Chameleon schema considered harmful

To put my prior virtual agreement with the objection into perspective, 
though,
I should point out that the chameleon namespace issue arises not out of 
some
fundamental misunderstanding of software engineering principles on our 
part
but rather it comes from the requirements for ease-of-authoring and 
simplified 
document migration.  These demands are steeped in the same tea from which
comes the requirement to continue innovating tag soup HTML.

People want the pace of change to be a lot slower, and we are responding 
to
that by trying as best we can to ease the migration path so that there are 
many
stepping stones rather than one giant cliff between the HTML forms of 
yesterdecade and full XForms support.  It's achievable, and most of it can
even be back-ported to tag soup.  But either way, part of the solution has 
to be
that in an HTML document, the forms-related tags live in the HTML 
namespace,
which means they have to be imported.

And of course I stand behind the earlier claim that uses of XForms in 
other
technologies should be based on the XForms namespace because those
other host technologies already have a history of namespace qualification, 

so there is no giant lizard of inertia to contend with.

Cheers,
John M. Boyer, Ph.D.
STSM: Workplace Forms Architect and Researcher
Co-Chair, W3C Forms Working Group
Workplace, Portal and Collaboration Software
IBM Victoria Software Lab
E-Mail: boyerj@ca.ibm.com  http://www.ibm.com/software/

Blog: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/blogs/page/JohnBoyer





"Anne van Kesteren" <fora@annevankesteren.nl> 
Sent by: w3c-forms-request@w3.org
10/26/2006 04:46 PM

To
"Elliotte Harold" <elharo@metalab.unc.edu>, www-forms-editor@w3.org
cc

Subject
Re: Chameleon schema considered harmful








On Wed, 25 Oct 2006 22:19:39 +0200, Elliotte Harold 
<elharo@metalab.unc.edu> wrote:
> I want to raise a formal objection to the whole idea of chameleon 
> namespaces in XForms 1.1. This is not how namespaces are designed to 
> work and it's going to cause massive problems for anyone writing any 
> sort of software to process XForms, whether it's DOM, SAX. XSLT, XPath, 
> or almost anything else.
>
> XForms elements should be able to be recognized by their namespace 
> alone. I should not have to care about the host language in which 
> they're embedded.
>
> If we're going to go changing the namespace for every host language that 
 
> comes along, we might as well not have namespaces in the first place.

In case my previous objections weren't clear enough, I'm seconding this 
formal objection. Please mark my disagreement clearly in the disposition 
of comments.


-- 
Anne van Kesteren
<http://annevankesteren.nl/>
<http://www.opera.com/>