Re: Extensibility strategies, was: Deciding in public (Was: SVGWG SVG-in-HTML proposal)

Julian Reschke wrote:
> Because I believe that URIs are the safest and most widely used way for 
> disambiguation

I can buy this.

> and mixing URIs with free-form identifiers just is 
> asking for clashes.

Clashes between the URIs and the free-form identifiers?  I'm not sure I 
buy that.  You really think that someone will create a free-form 
identifier that looks like a URI and not _think_ of it as a URI?

> If you think it is so unlikely, why not make a statement that something 
> that parses as a URI must be a URI under the control of the party 
> minting the identifier?

One could, but people will just ignore such a statement, pretty much 
like every other authoring requirement.  Especially because this one is 
not machine-verifiable.

>> None of these problems exist if you don't have prefixes.
> 
> Yes, that can happen.
> 
> That being said, I've been working with XML + namespaces since these 
> specs came out, and that problem never *ever* occurred to me in 
> practice.

There've been a number of Mozilla bugs on just such issues in the XML 
serializer.  In practice, some people create DOMs that look just like 
that, then move the DOM nodes around, then try to serialize as XML.  We 
have a whole bunch of code to fix up prefixes as we go when serializing 
to handle the mess.

I have no idea how common this is, but common enough for people to have 
cared enough to file a dozen or so bugs over the last few years.

> - the spec to give rules for the formats of these names, so clashes are 
> avoided (if you use a URI, use one you have authority over)

Seriously, if someone is using a URI they don't have authority over, 
they are either copy/pasting (in which case they won't even know about 
the proposed requirement) or doing it on purpose (in which case they 
will ignore the requirement even if they know about it).

-Boris

Received on Tuesday, 5 August 2008 16:47:56 UTC