Re: Update on namespaces

At 14:59 1997 06 18 -0500, David G. Durand wrote:

>If someone could explain how the notion of validity could be plaubily
>extended in the next 10 days to cover some GI-hacking proposal, my
>objections don't have any weight. 

This is a good point, and I welcome more discussion on this point.

Here's how I've contented myself to date by thinking of it as follows.

If you add : to namechar and then explicitly prepend every element
name with the appropriate "namespaceid:", you have effectively created 
what you can consider to be a single new namespace in which all names
are unique.  For any document instance in this new namespace (in which
every name just happens to have a colon in it), there are an infinite
number of DTDs one could write (where every element name in any of these
DTDs just happens to have a colon in it).  In practice, I posit that
someone with knowledge of how the various namespaces interact (e.g.,
an ISO 12083 article document that uses CALS tables and AAP math) 
could take the various DTDs and combine them into one DTD (in which
every name just happens to have a colon in it) that would be reasonable
to use as the DTD against which to validate any instance that combines
these namespaces.

No one said that there needs to be some magic way to derive automatically
from the constituent DTDs some DTD that properly combines the namespaces.
DTD creation has never been magic or automatic (except in the trivial
case of creating just a "DTD that works" for a specific instance, which
you can still do for an instance composed from multiple namespaces), so
why should it have to be for the namespace issue?

Received on Wednesday, 18 June 1997 15:22:41 UTC