namespaces-considered-harmful

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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.

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.

See Also