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Namespace confusion
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This page is for collecting evidence about Namespaces in XML not being helpful.
Namespaces are for Programmers
- If you are not a programmer, you do not need namespaces
- If you are a programmer, you do not need XML nonsense
Bugs caused by Namespaces
- Redeclaring a namespace breaks
- Prefix difference breaks
- Prefix difference breaks
- Wrong prefix used causing bad expansion
- Feed aggregators failing with prefixed XHTML elements
- Declared prefix and used prefix differ
- RDFa used without declaring prefix
- Hard-wired prefix
- Namespace bugs in the WebDAV implementation in Windows
- Unbound prefix in Yahoo! real estate ads (example tweeted as RDFa news about new use of RDFa)
Wrong documentation about Namespaces
- “90% of the technical questions” writes the O’Reilly XForms book author
- “Experience shows XML namespaces can be a common cause of confusion”
- “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
- “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
E-mails detailing lists of problems with namespaces
- A WHATWG e-mail by Henri Sivonen in the context of RDFa
- "Why bound prefixes are an anti-pattern in language design" by Ian Hickson
- Objections by Henri Sivonen to a proposal to introduce more namespaces to text/html
E-mails showing confusion with namespaces
- 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.)
- Confusion about what
<div xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/">declares (Initially suspected to be sarcasm!)