namespaces discussions off-topic (was Re: [uf-discuss] changing abbr-design-pattern to title-design-pattern?)

[Tantek Ç elik]

On 4/30/07 6:20 PM, "James Craig" <jcraig at apple.com> wrote:

> but this battle has been fought and
> lost before. If you want to mount another advance, my +1 will be
> right behind you, but my morale in the fight will not be very high.
> The target is very well-entrenched.

Namespaced content on the Web has failed.  This has nothing to do with any
entrenchment.  It's just the sad reality of namespaces.  They suck in
practice, and no amount of theoretical worship (+1ing etc.) will change
that.

It's been tried by numerous groups, before microformats, and after.  It's
even been tried in the context of RSS and RDF, and in practice people write
scrapers that look for namespace prefixes as if they are part of the element
name, not as mere shorthands for namespace URIs.

If you want to carry on a theoretical discussion of namespaces, please do so
elsewhere, for in practice, discussing them is a waste of time, and
off-topic for microformats lists.

Tantek