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.