David Megginson has reopened the discussion on how
to deal with namespaces in SAX2.
He proposed a helper class to encapsulate James Clark's
{URI}localpart notation for namespace-qualified names, with
the aim of preserving backwards-compatibility.
Tim Bray objected:
"I'm not sure backwards-compatible is really a good idea.
The
namespace-sensitive and namespace-oblivious views of a chunk
of XML
are just deeply, totally, massively incompatible, and it
seems wrong
to try to paper that over. I also don't think it's worth
investing
any effort at all in accomodating XML documents that use
colons in names
but aren't namespace-aware, given the explicit warnings
against doing
this in the XML 1.0 spec."
The debate is providing a
lively analysis of the state of the XML world, pre- and
post-namespaces.