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To: sfpug@sf.pm.org From: Joe Brenner <doom@kzsu.stanford.edu> Subject: Re: [sf-perl] Date: Fri, 23 Nov 2001 10:47:06 -0800 By the way, if anyone cares, I'm not so much into anti-XML flaming as anti-XML-hype-sarcasm. As far as I can tell in my admittedly limited study of the subject, XML is a standardized framework for creating incompatible data formats. There's probably some value in this... if I were going to create a new data format for some reason, I probably would use XML to do it (and stick an X in the name, and see if I can get O'Reilly to publish a book about it...). I just don't see what all the fuss is about. Allow me to quote "Learning XML", p. 45: Namespaces can be a headache if used in conjunction with a DTD. It would be nice if the parser ignored any elements or attributes from another namespace, so your document would validate under a DTD that had no knowledge of the namespace. Unfortunately, that is not the case. To use a namespace with a DTD, you have to rewrite the DTD so it knows about the elements in that namespace. Another problem with namespaces is that they don't import a DTD or any other kind of information about the elements and attributes of any other kind of information about the elements and attributes you're using. So you can actually make up your own elements, add the namespace prefix, and the parser will be none the wiser. This makes namespaces less useful for those who want to constrain their documents to conform to a DTD. For these and other reasons, namespaces are a point of contention among XML planners. Is this really ready for prime-time? ===