RE: Section 23.4 Appendix 4 - XML Namespace in WebDAV

> This is really gross. The XML Namespaces spec seems to consider a
> (namespace, name) pair as the unique value, rather than namespace+name.
> Maybe I misread the XML spec.

Don't hold anything back, tell me what you *really* think about it :-)

> Doing it this way just doesn't seem Right. Why can't the DAV spec use
> the ordered-pair approach? The two links that were posted at the start
> of the thread only deal with the fact that the XML spec was included
> into the DAV spec, rather than a discussion of *why* we use this
> approach. Does anybody have a reference to a discussion on "why"? (or
> can explain why?)

One rationale is that the design group identified that this was a problem in
earlier versions of the XML Namespace specification, and developed a
mechanism for addressing the problem which worked, and would ensure
interoperability across the wire. There was a perception that this wasn't a
major problem, and that it was better to rapidly develop a mechanism that
worked, than to spend a lot of time on it.

Another rationale is that we wanted to stay true to the property model where
a property is a name, value pair, where the name is a URI, and the value is
a well-formed chunk of XML.  Viewing an XML namespace + element as a
namespace, element pair is different from saying they are concatenated, and
hence capable of forming a URI.  Since we wanted to marshall property names
using a namespace + element pair, the concatenation approach better
supported this marshalling.

- Jim

Received on Thursday, 1 April 1999 19:27:16 UTC