On Thu, 24 Apr 2008, Ari Torhamo wrote:
> on the other hand because some of the argumenting has been based on
> how the use of namespaces would affect the inexperienced OSM:ers - like
> me.
Thanks for your input - you're *exactly* the sort of person we need to
hear from, rather than reasoning on a purely technical level or making
assumptions about how good/bad things are for inexperienced people.
> I had to go to
> Wikipedia to find out what a namespace stands for
...
> I do understand the idea of a namspace
> now, but I would need to know more about the practical implementation to
> know if using namespaces would feel too complicated to me.
Well, it is important to realise that there is no real need to know what a
namespace is to use namespaced tags, and there isn't really any
implementation as such - it is purely a convention for tag names. So
instead of having a tag such as "grade", which is fairly meaningless
without further context (which is provided by the other tags on the node),
you call the tag "climbing:grade", making it really obvious that it is a
climbing grade (i.e. how difficult the climbing route is). Nothing is
different, other than the tag name.
In my view, this simplifies things since it makes tags unique - you know
that "climbing:grade" is always going to be a climbing grade and you need
no further information to do things like look up the definition of the tag
on the wiki.
For people who don't know or care what a namespace is, this is really no
different from the existing system - you want to tag something so you look
it up in the wiki to see what the convention is and the wiki tells you
what tag name to use.
> in a sence that same tags might
> default to different tag properties, depending on the context.
This is a good point. I'm not sure how well it would apply in practice
though. At the moment, the defaults for certain tags do change based on
quite a few factors.
> It would be
> interesting to see a few real life scenarios, perhaps a best case,
> typical case and a worst case, where one would be able to compare the
> case of using namespaces to not using them.
This is an interesting idea (although I don't think anyone is suggesting
changing any existing tags to name-spaced ones at the moment - the
discussion is really revolving around new tags). I'm not sure how you
would define "best case" and "worst case" though, and you really need to
consider the system as a whole rather than isolated cases because the main
reason for namespaces is to avoid ambiguity with other tags used elsewhere
on the system.
- Steve
xmpp:[EMAIL PROTECTED] sip:[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.nexusuk.org/
Servatis a periculum, servatis a maleficum - Whisper, Evanescence
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