Re: Update on namespaces

At 2:32 PM -0500 6/18/97, Paul Grosso wrote:
>At 15:23 1997 06 18 -0500, David G. Durand wrote:
>> Namespaces were a proposed solution to the
>>requirement to attach semantics to elements in a DTD-independent way.
>
>If this is true, then I'm on the wrong wave length.
>
>I do not see namespaces as attaching semantics to elements, but
>only as a way to uniquify otherwise non-unique names.  This, for
>me, is the XML-namespace issue.  Attaching semantics is either
>the XML-style or XML-datatyping or XML-link or whatever issue.
>Let's keep orthogonal issues as separate as possible.

If there's no semantics associated with the name, then why bother to do
this. If there is semantics associated with the name, and that's what's
really important, then there is a good reason. But in that case, primacy of
thesemantic association suggests other solutions.

we want to differentiate different uses of <a> bevause they have different
meanings, right? The stylesheet issues would follow as a consequence of
that, rather than stylesheet dispatch being the central issue. Stylesheet
displatch can work as well off attributes as GIs also.

BTW if you go back to the original namespace proposal, the association of
semantics is the only _explicitly cited_ reason for using namespaces.

  -- David

_________________________________________
David Durand              dgd@cs.bu.edu  \  david@dynamicDiagrams.com
Boston University Computer Science        \  Sr. Analyst
http://www.cs.bu.edu/students/grads/dgd/   \  Dynamic Diagrams
--------------------------------------------\  http://dynamicDiagrams.com/
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Received on Wednesday, 18 June 1997 15:56:50 UTC