Looking for XML in All the Wrong Places is supposed to cover all the vagaries of XML usage in the Web-world.

Finding well-formed XML on the ‘net can be quite a chore 😉

As I walk in they’re discussing XML micro-formats. The discussion shifts to namespaces and namespacing your documents.

Oops! The classic namespace boner cropped up – “namespaces are the like tm:”. For XML wonks, the confusion between a tag’s namespace prefix (the “tm:” in “tm:title”, for instance) and the namespace itself is neverending. Essentially, the prefix is malleable and can be arbitrarilly assigned while the namespace is invariant.

I jumped in to point out the difference and asked the panel if they thought the namespace should be well-defined – like with a schema. Panel split on this.

Best reccommedation on namespaces, etc. – use RDF to help tease out the structures for micro-formats, extending formats (like RSS) using namespaces.