- From: Elliotte Rusty Harold <elharo@metalab.unc.edu>
- Date: Tue, 9 Jul 2002 08:49:00 -0400
- To: abcoates@TheOffice.net, Misha.Wolf@reuters.com, Martin Duerst <duerst@w3.org>
- Cc: w3c-i18n-ig@w3.org, www-tag@w3.org
At 11:33 AM +0000 7/9/02, Anthony B. Coates wrote: >While I appreciate the correctness of your interpretation, its >counter-intuitiveness should (I hope) make it unacceptable as a >final solution. We already have enough issues arising from people >ignoring the social consequences of suggesting that the best >practice for namespace names is to use a URI, while simultaneously >insisting that any such namespace URLs must be treated as >dereferenceable locations. If we add to that the non-processing of >%-escapes, it will just make XML namespaces even less approachable >to that overwhelming majority of the world who cannot count >themselves among the namespace cogniscenti. > Unfortunately that horse has left the barn. The namespaces spec already states that namespace URIs are compared character for character. Current interpretation of that and current software practice is that ~ and %7e and %7E are *not* the same. While I agree it would have been a good idea to fix this back when namespaces was invented, doing so now would be a disaster even worse than the post facto assignment of a namespace URI to the xmlns prefix. The world would be divided into software that supported the namespaces spec and software that supported the IRI spec. You could not do both. Worse yet, there would be no marker indicating which version any given document or application used. It is more important here to stick with the original behavior than to do the optimal thing. -- +-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+ | Elliotte Rusty Harold | elharo@metalab.unc.edu | Writer/Programmer | +-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+ | XML in a Nutshell, 2nd Edition (O'Reilly, 2002) | | http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/xian2/ | | http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN%3D0596002920/cafeaulaitA/ | +----------------------------------+---------------------------------+ | Read Cafe au Lait for Java News: http://www.cafeaulait.org/ | | Read Cafe con Leche for XML News: http://www.cafeconleche.org/ | +----------------------------------+---------------------------------+
Received on Tuesday, 9 July 2002 08:51:33 UTC