Advice from an outsider, hopefully useful

Hi, I just read the few messages on the standards list, and would like to make a quick suggestion. Before you all pull the trigger of that weapon aimed at your collective feet, take a page from the W3C, and do an extended period to request comments on the standards from the public before announcing them as finalized. Otherwise the risk is a standard in name only. Another way of thinking of it: you all are the esteemed ambassadors from your projects, but you still have to return home and convince your partisan bickering masses that what you have negotiated with foreign powers is in their best interest. About the actual proposal, For me, some more clarification/changes are needed on a few points: 1) The standard only mentions Underscored_Classnames, but has no mention of the truly standard way of doing things: Backslashed\Classnames. ns\name\Class\Name works just fine (the namespace/class barrier is obvious - the first capital letter is the start of the classname), and allows access to sub-namespaces using "relative namespace paths" (see the manual for clarification on this point, it was not present in early alphas of PHP 5.3). 2) Why is the package name present with underscores in the namespace name? I raised strong objections to this point over a year ago when it was first proposed to PEAR, and these seem to have been ignored. It will encourage coding mega-packages or weird hacks like empty shell classes (namespace ns/package;class Classname extends ns/split_package/Classname {}) for API BC compatibility. Far simpler, and much better, is to require vendor\ only, and to allow vendor-specific class name/package name mapping with a suggested format. 3) Arguments or standards suggestions that were ruled out need to be documented as well, or you'll find that newcomers talk in circles re-hashing everything. Let's also not ignore ezComponents or pecl/automap solution to locating classes - a static array mapping class name to file. This is much more performant in autoload (no include_path search), but requires the extra step of generating the static array. Thus the standards should mention that vendors may provide a vendor-specific autoload which should be loaded before the standardized one. In general, I'd say this is a step in the right direction. Greg