The debate over how many namespaces XHTML really deserves is dominating the XML-dev list well past the end of the end of the official W3C review period, which was to end on 22 September. The current thread, "XHTML and the Three Namespaces," shows no signs of reaching a happy 'just right' ending.

Andrew Layman, of Microsoft, started the thread with an ardent technical defense of the three namespace proposal, which would assign separate namespaces to strict, transitional, and frameset HTML vocabularies. Marc McDonald, David Brownell, Arjun Ray, and others criticized the apparent one-to-one connection between namespaces and schemas, though Layman defended and clarified his argument.

The debate is continuing, and may well outlive the W3C's XHTML decision-making process. This first major test for namespaces has reiginited all of the controversy that the namespaces draft produced in January. Many of the same questions about 'what namespaces do' are apparently unresolved, at least within the W3C.