Re: Pipeline Composition and our Recent Pipeline Name/Library Decision

/ ht@inf.ed.ac.uk (Henry S. Thompson) was heard to say:
| Norman Walsh writes:
|
|> The new status quo:
|>
|>  - Requires pipeline-libraries to have a namespace. That's more
|>    complex and is going to be harder to explain.
|
| Not requires -- perfectly OK to define pipeline-library in no
| namespace.

I suppose.

| Contrast the _status quo ante_ - pipeline might or might not have
| namespaces, who knows when or why.

I know exactly when, when it's name contains a colon. I don't know
why any more or less than I know why the pipeline library does or
does not have a namespace.

|>  - Appears to make importing single pipelines quite different from
|>    importing a library.
|
| Not at all -- the import is trivial in either case.

I'm not sure I agree. Did you consider Alex's case of a library that
imports a single pipeline?

|>  - Either changes the name of pipelines imported to a library vs.
|>    imported to a pipeline or further complicates the semantics of
|>    import.
|
| We can't import _anything_ into a library, what's the issue?

Sure you can, you can import other libraries or pipelines.

|>  - Was motivated in part by an understanding of the XML Schema spec
|>    that turned out not to be correct.
|
| It wasn't incorrect, it's just not as well supported by the Schema
| spec. as it should be.
|
|> It seems to me that life would, in fact, be simpler if we said that
|> the names of steps are QNames
|
| That's _worse_ than the _status quo_, in which at least steps have
| NCNames.  We're only arguing about pipelines, I hope.

I'd be happiest, I think, to simply make them all QNames for consistency.

Having the names of steps be NCNames but the names of Pipelines be
QNames complicates the semantics of @step on p:pipe.

|> and that an unqualified name is never in a namespace. Those are
|> certainly rules that will be familiar to users of XSLT.
|
| And confusing to users of XML Schema. . .

Ok. So it's partly a matter of taste. I think QNames taste better in
this context.

                                        Be seeing you,
                                          norm

-- 
Norman Walsh
XML Standards Architect
Sun Microsystems, Inc.