While reading the "location, location, location" section in the chapter on building apps of the evolving Magnolia 5 book, it occurred to me that we could save us some hassle with non-unique app ids, if we'd introduce (simple) namespaces.

Wouldn't it be helpful to reserve the "mgnl" prefix for us and then change the URLs to become, e.g.:

#app:mgnl-pages:editor;/mypath/topage:preview

or

#shell:mgnl-pulse:inbox

?

That way we could ensure that, should someone indeed unknowingly re-use an already used app id such as "pages" or "contacts", Magnolia would still come up and work properly. Plus, such a change would also lower the entry barrier as I'd expect such errors to be hard to find for Magnolia beginners, even if we show a message in the log files.

We could even go as far and use the same namespace also for sub-app ids.