On Oct 2, 2005, at 11:15 PM, Mark Nottingham wrote:
I think this is a well-intentioned effort, but at the wrong end of the process. The market (i.e., users and implementors) should have a go at sorting out at what's common/prevalent enough to merit this sort of thing; having a co-ordinated namespace will lead to the problem of what to lump into it, how to version individual extensions within it, etc.
I have to agree with Mark. Consider this scenario: an extension gets added to ACE. Someone makes an extension that does the same thing differently. The market prefers the non-ACE method and adopts it more widely than the ACE solution. Now not only do you have multiple namespaces to declare, but one of them has a bunch of elements that don't get used, yet implementors feel compelled to implement them because they're part of this special namespace.
Here's another scenario: an extension gets added to ACE, and another extension gets created that does the same thing better. Because the first has the ACE stamp of approval, the inferior method gets wide support, and the superior method dies.
Both scenarios suggest that the market should be given time to choose best practices rather than some group deciding which practices are going to get special status in advance. If a feed is going to carry elements from a bunch of different extensions, it's going to be a relatively heavy feed anyway. The overhead of including multiple namespace declarations isn't going to be that great.
