> I posit that the lack of namespaces was not in small part responsible for
> this success. That is to say, I would guess that every namespace added to
> a language will dramatically reduce it's ease of use for authors. I know

I'd agree.  I refer to this effect as "single technology solutions".
It is, for example, one reason why people do not make use of the
capabilities of HTTP Servers.  EcmaScript, DOMs, and CSS are seen
as part of HTML in popular culture, and can be included in the same
file, so count as one technology.  Flash is a problem in this model.

One particular downside of it (besides Javascript questions on this
list) is that nearly every computing standard starts off focussed, but
eventually expands to do everything that went before did.

(Please copy any replies direct as the list manager insists that my
ISP accept all the spam and worms on the list, but I'm not prepared to
let them accept around 200 a day from all sources, and, as a result,
get unsubscribed every few hours.)