namespaces-considered-harmful
namespaces considered harmful
(This article is a stub, feel free to expand upon it)
The mixed namespace approach has already been tried by *numerous* others since 1998 and has failed on the Web.
http://blog.davidjanes.com/mtarchives/2005_10.html#003410
OTOH, 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.
http://microformats.org/blog/2006/01/09/tim-bray-on-creating-xml-dialects/
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.
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.