Comment by somat
I actually rather like XML(asterisk) But this is one of it's warts, It wants to be two things, A markup language, it's in the name and arguably where it should have stayed, and an object notation. This is where you start to question some of XML's fundamentals, stuff like why is it redundant? When do you stick data in attributes? Or is it better to nest tags all the way down?
Asterisk: except namespaces, I loathe those, you are skipping happily along chewing through your XML, xpathing left and right, and then find out some psychopath has decided to use namespaces, and now every thing has become super awkward and formal.
Namespaces are essential whenever you want to insert contents defined by one schema into “payload” or “application-defined” elements of another schema. There are also more complex scenarios where attributes from one schema are used to annotate elements from a different schema.
Well, I guess we could do it like libraries in C-land and have every schema add its own informal identifier prefix to avoid name collisions. But there’s a reason why programming languages moved to namespaces as an explicit notion.