Discuss whether to namespace or not to namespace?

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

XML documents can have any format unless specifically tied to a vocabulary. The question of whether or not to namespace often arises. Because namespaces must be added to both the XML document and any associated CSS, adding a namespace prefix requires quite a bit of document customization. Some programmers feel that using namespaces in XML and CSS documents "clutters" the code, and they argue that it would be better to modify any custom vocabularies as much as possible to avoid name collision problems. This would allow the XML and CSS documents to remain more flexible. To avoid namespace collisions, the name of one item (typically the one used less often) would need to be
changed to some other name. Although this seems like a simple solution, it could be difficult to implement because there is no master list of all element and attribute names for XML vocabularies. Therefore, you may not always be able to predetermine where every possible name collision will occur. Another approach would be to put unique characters before the names so that the names differ and further name collisions are unlikely to happen. Regardless of which approach you take to avoid namespace collisions, it should be applied consistently throughout the system.