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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?
===