Namespaced action and filter tags

Question

I'm upgrading several of my plugins to use PHP namespaces, so that functions, classes, constants etc are all namespaced correctly.

<?php
namespace my\plugin;

function init() { 
  ... 
}

//  Calls \my\plugin\init();
add_action('init', __NAMESPACE__.'\init');

In several places my plugin calls do_action or apply_filters so that other plugins can modify its behaviour. If these are actions or filters that are unique to my plugin, it seems to me they should be namespaced as well, like so:

do_action('\my\plugin\stuff');
$value = apply_filters('\my\plugin\value', $value);

But I don't see anybody else out there doing this. Aside from namespaces requiring PHP 5.3, is there a good reason why not? Are the \ characters going to break on some platforms or with some unusual settings?

Answer 1

There is nothing technically wrong with that, but backslashes are hard to type on some keyboard layouts. On a German keyboard for example, you have to hit the right AltGr key plus \ at the same time.

This is not easy to type (and one of the reasons why I use an English keyboard). Use dots, colons or underscores to namespace your hooks. They are not bound to the PHP syntax anyway.