in his blog, Norman Walsh writes about an even-simpler-than-Mixro-XML markup language, inspired in part by John Cowan’s XML Prague poster and by James Clark’s Micro XML ideas. His ideas are well worth a serious consideration–Norm’s ideas are always worth considering–but the purist in me cringes at the idea of allowing more than one root element. I have to say that I find the idea attractive but I’m not really big on change so maybe that is why I hesitate.

The pragmatist in me, on the other hand, also cringes at Norm’s not doing away with namespaces when he has the chance. in my experience they always create more problems than they solve, but on the other hand, my experience tends to be more about strictly controlled environments where the issues one usually wishes to solve using namespaces can be dealt with using other means.