The Lurker

Avoiding namespaces at all costs

posted by ajf on 2003-06-30 at 10:30 pm

Bill de hÓra writes on RSS2.0 sans XML Namespaces:

The other is with namespaces. Namespaces are defined by URI, so their uniqueness is ensured in the same way as Java package names.

The third unstated option is to make your element name sufficiently unique. To do this, you can simply use fully qualified domain names to wrap your vocabulary or element.

[...]

Here are some options:

<net.amadan.lastUpdated>

<lastUpdated vocab="net.amadan.rss-ext">

<net.amadan.rss-ext><lastUpdated/><net.amadan.rss-ext>

Yes, the problem is the need to "make your element name sufficiently unique". But, given that the W3C has recommended a way to do so, a method with which anyone working with XML is already familiar, why would you use another approach which derives its uniqueness from the same source anyway?