W3C home > Mailing lists > Public > public-xml-id@w3.org > February 2005

Re: id is Candidate Recommendation (Call for Implementations)

From: Robin Berjon <robin.berjon@expway.fr>
Date: Wed, 09 Feb 2005 19:31:34 +0100
Message-ID: <420A5706.9050501@expway.fr>
To: John Boyer <JBoyer@PureEdge.com>
Cc: W3C Advisory Committee <w3c-ac-members@w3.org>, W3C Working Group Chairs <chairs@w3.org>, public-xml-id@w3.org

John Boyer wrote:
> Either way, a separate issue emerges.  Some group at the core 
> of the W3C needs to come to a decision about what a namespace 
> means and whether additions, deletions or changes to the schema 
> (the collection of names) necessitates a change of namespace URI.  

That would be the TAG. As it happens, it's already working on versioning 
and extensibility. I would therefore recommend that the discussion take 
place there.

> My read of the definition of namespace (a collection of names 
> *identified* by a URI) suggests that an answer is yes because 
> two different collections of names are not identical.
> 
> A 'no' decision (i.e. that changing the vocabulary does not require
> a change of namespace URI) may have significant policy ramifications.  
> For example, would it be permissible for the XForms working group 
> to issue XForms 1.1 without changing the namespace URI from the one 
> used in XForms 1.0?  It is very easy for me to illustrate the 
> disastrous consequences of such a decision.

Even if you were right, which I would contest, it is too late to change 
the way things are already been done. Namespaces aren't version 
identifiers, they're just that: namespaces. Rare are the languages that 
change their namespaces when they modify the vocabulary: XHTML and SVG 
don't do that for instance, and I'd be very surprised — shocked in fact 
— if XForms did.

-- 
Robin Berjon
   Research Scientist
   Expway, http://expway.com/
Received on Wednesday, 9 February 2005 18:31:38 GMT

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