namespaces-considered-harmful: Difference between revisions
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(This article is a stub, feel free to expand upon it) | (This article is a stub, feel free to expand upon it) | ||
In particular namespaces for '''content''' are considered harmful (e.g. XML namespaces). Namespaces for code is outside the bounds of the topic of this page. | |||
The mixed namespace approach has already been tried by *numerous* others since 1998 and has failed on the Web. | The mixed namespace approach has already been tried by *numerous* others since 1998 and has failed on the Web. | ||
Revision as of 15:20, 1 May 2007
namespaces considered harmful
(This article is a stub, feel free to expand upon it)
In particular namespaces for content are considered harmful (e.g. XML namespaces). Namespaces for code is outside the bounds of the topic of this page.
The mixed namespace approach has already been tried by *numerous* others since 1998 and has failed on the Web.
- XML - what is it good for? by David Janes
- XML on the Web has Failed by Mark Pilgrim
- Tim Bray on creating XML dialects
On the other hand, XHTML + semantic-class-names has seen widespread adoption among the web authoring/design/IA/publishing community. Microformats is leveraging the approach that is both working better and frankly dominating in practice on the Web.
Namespaces are actually a *huge* negative. Search for:
Namespaces are actually *not* well supported in sufficient modern browsers, nor even sufficiently with enough W3C technologies or test suites as compared to (X)HTML + semantic-class-names + CSS.
Namespaces encourage people to seclude themselves in their own namespace and invent their own schema rather than reusing existing elements in existing formats. This hurts interoperability because a dozen different namespaces can all have their own slightly different semantics for the same element. See BuildOrBuy for support for this argument, specifically
Use somebody elses rather than making aliases on purpose. It's one thing to make your own and then discover that there's something equivalent out there. It's quite another to willfully clutter the semantic web with aliases; the latter increases the burden on the community of consuming your data, so it's anti-social.
If you start thinking about the web in terms of OOP and polymorphism, namespaces break the polymorphic model that allows you handle widely varied data structures using the same methods.