RE: TB16 Re: Comments on arch doc draft

At 09:49 2002 07 02 -0700, Dare Obasanjo wrote:

>-----Original Message----- 
>From: Tim Bray [mailto:tbray@textuality.com] 
>Sent: Tue 7/2/2002 9:31 AM 
>To: www-tag@w3.org 
>Cc: 
>Subject: Re: TB16 Re: Comments on arch doc draft
>
>>> This seems fine to me.  But for God's sake let's make sure any guidance
>>> on this makes it very clear that this is a namespace *name*, and
>>> although it may function as a stand-in for the namespace URI, it is
>>> *not* the URI.
>
>>I can find no distinction in any normative prose anywhere between
>>"namespace name" and "namespace URI".  -Tim
>
>a.) Just because the W3C working groups have overlooked the difference does not mean one does not exist
>
>b.) I haven't seen any normative prose where the term "namespace name" is normatively linked with "namespace URI" nor can I find one where "namespace URI" is normatively designed. XQuery, XPath and XSLT use "namespace URI" while XML Schema and Namespaces in XML use "namespace name". The XML infoset REC uses both terms interchangeably 

That's a bit of an exaggeration.

I just scanned [1] and their is only one (1) occurrence of the phrase 
"namespace URI" (except in the title of a reference):

  By definition, all namespace attributes (including those named xmlns,
  whose [prefix] property has no value) have a namespace URI of
  http://www.w3.org/2000/xmlns/

Arguably, that is a typo and should read "namespace name", but
that's no where near "using the terms interchangeably."  This typo
probably occurred because it was the DOM that requested that we
bind http://www.w3.org/2000/xmlns/ to namespace attributes, and
the DOM uses the term namespaceURI instead of namespace name.

On the other hand, given that http://www.w3.org/2000/xmlns/ is
clearly a URI, I'm not even sure this usage is wrong.

I was under the impression that Dan Connolly was the key person
behind the drive to distinguish namespace name (the "right hand
side" of a namespace declaration) from namespace URI when he was
trying to argue that the right hand side of a namespace declaration
should be allowed to be non-absolute.  But I am not willing to troll
through the archives of that long discussion to find out, so I'll
just apologize in advance if I've misrepresented Dan.

paul

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/xml-infoset/

Received on Tuesday, 2 July 2002 14:07:05 UTC