Namespace confusion

2010-12-29T20:45:08Z

Frednurk: old link was seemingly to the wrong post (and not by Ian Hickson), this appears to be the right link

This page is for collecting evidence about Namespaces in XML not being helpful.

==Bugs caused by Namespaces==

* [http://bugs.sun.com/bugdatabase/view_bug.do?bug_id=6475032 Redeclaring a namespace breaks]
* [http://dev.ctor.org/soap4r/ticket/179 Prefix difference breaks]
* [https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&atid=454391&aid=924041&group_id=48863 Prefix difference breaks]
* [http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-rdf-in-xhtml-tf/2009May/0064.html Wrong prefix used causing bad expansion]
* [http://hsivonen.iki.fi/atom-xhtml/ Feed aggregators failing with prefixed XHTML elements]
* [http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-rdfa/2009Mar/0068.html Declared prefix and used prefix differ]
* [http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-rdfa/2009Mar/0060.html RDFa used without declaring prefix]
* [http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-rdf-in-xhtml-tf/2009Mar/0100.html Hard-wired prefix]
* [http://www.greenbytes.de/tech/webdav/webdav-redirector-list.html#issue-namespace-handling Namespace bugs in the WebDAV implementation in Windows]

==Wrong documentation about Namespaces==

* [http://lists.whatwg.org/pipermail/whatwg-whatwg.org/2009-May/019717.html Wrong URI declared (slash missing)]
* [http://www.jenitennison.com/blog/node/104#comment-4957 Prefix missing]

==Namespace-related questions==

* [http://lists.xml.org/archives/xml-dev/200502/msg00306.html prefix difference]
* [http://lists.xml.org/archives/xml-dev/200808/msg00030.html declaring the same nsprefix twice on one element]

==Namespace-related anecdotes==

* [http://www.w3.org/2004/04/webapps-cdf-ws/papers/verity.html “90% of the technical questions” writes the O’Reilly XForms book author]
* [http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/x-abolns.html “Experience shows XML namespaces can be a common cause of confusion”]
* [http://nothing-more.blogspot.com/2004/10/loving-and-hating-xml-namespaces_21.html “If there is any one of the W3C's family of XML specifications, that has caused me the most grief, XML Namespaces is probably it.” writes the Lead Developer of MSXML and System.Xml]
* [http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2003/12/13/MegaXML “I have a picture that made the audience at the session gasp in disbelief.” (Picture showing lots of namespace declarations.)]

==Related pages on other wikis==

* [http://microformats.org/wiki/namespaces-considered-harmful Namespaces considered harmful on the Microformats wiki]

==E-mails detailing lists of problems with namespaces==

* [http://lists.whatwg.org/pipermail/whatwg-whatwg.org/2008-August/015905.html A WHATWG e-mail by Henri Sivonen in the context of RDFa]
* [http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-rdf-in-xhtml-tf/2009Aug/0035.html "Why bound prefixes are an anti-pattern in language design" by Ian Hickson]
* [http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-archive/2010Sep/0054.html Objections by Henri Sivonen to a proposal to introduce more namespaces to text/html]

==E-mails showing confusion with namespaces==

* [http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2008Aug/0499.html Karl Dubost on xml:lang in text/html] (Admittedly this is a rather hard case given that {lang}, {xml:lang}, and xml{lang} all exist.)
* [http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-rdf-in-xhtml-tf/2009Aug/0085.html Confusion about what <code><div xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/"></code> declares] ([http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-rdf-in-xhtml-tf/2009Aug/0086.html Initially suspected to be sarcasm!])

==Confusion about the Origin of Namespaces==

* [http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/semantic-web/2007Dec/0116.html TimBL addresses confusion about the cause and effect of RDF and Namespaces]

== More about Namespaces ==
* http://lists.whatwg.org/pipermail/whatwg-whatwg.org/2006-November/007663.html

WHATWG Wiki - User contributions [en]

Namespace confusion