PUBLIC MARKS with tag namespaces

We were able to come up with rules that make using prefixes in almost any context simpler. Note, these are for the most part AUTHORING guidelines, not requirements when reading:

1. Reusing the same prefix in the same document with different meanings is horribly confusing (”If you did that, I’d break your figures.”). Possible to figure out, but not really desirable. Seems like a reasonable place for a warning.

2. Defining all the prefixes in one place makes it simpler to keep track of them. But understood when it would be simpler to define a new prefix for a section of content.

3. “Couldn’t you have a simple tool that just shows you what prefixes are defined at any point in the document?” How such a tool has failed to exist in the XML world… may write this.

Paul Mison has written an desktop-like machine tag browser which shows at a glance just how many different machine tag namespaces are out there.

Namespaces. In the world of most Javascript, everything is global or function-scope, there seems to be no use of namespace or module-style development at all. It's possible to simulate namespaces by wrapping entire modules in an object definition, but this is usually too much of a hassle for practicality.

I liked the final Namespace spec, even though it wasn't what I had originally argued for, but when you have a spec that almost *everyone* ignores or gets wrong (XSLT and SOAP excepted), it might be time to acknowledge that the problem is the spec instead of the implementors. I predict that the use of XML Namespaces will be an ongoing problem for Atom, even though it's not Atom's fault.