namespaces-considered-harmful
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, QNames in attributes etc.). Namespaces for code is outside the bounds of the topic of this page.
Author/Editor: Tantek Çelik
namespaced content has failed
Namespaced content on the Web has failed.
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.
namespaced content is not well supported
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.
articles documenting the failure of namespaced content
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
namespaces for content are a negative
Namespaces are actually a *huge* negative. Search for:
namespaced content discourages interoperability of data
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.
non-namespaced techniques have been succeeding =
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.