namespaces-considered-harmful

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Revision as of 20:33, 29 August 2006 by DavidOsolkowski (talk | contribs) (Reorganized a couple links, added another paragraph)
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namespaces considered harmful

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The mixed namespace approach has already been tried by *numerous* others since 1998 and has failed on the Web.

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.

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.

See Also