Re: RDDL again

I strongly feel that RDDL documents MUST be able to declare what 
namespace they are describing and SHOULD do so. There are two reasons 
for this.

  1. A RDDL document may be accessed through multiple URIs, especially 
if they are case-misspellings of each other. Plus, namespaces are much 
more strict about byte-for-byte compatibility than is web infrastructure 
in general. A tool should be able to validate namespace URI 
normalization by querying the normative URI in the RDDL.

  2. It is perfectly logical to copy RDDL documents to laptops and other 
"local contexts" for use when network connectivity is an issue (as it 
potentially always is for applications that cannot afford downtime). If 
the RDDL document is not self-describing, it will be necessary to keep 
around metadata about it which is a little silly. Metadata about the 
metadata just to avoid adding one element to the document itself?

Consider this exchange from www-tag in April.

Joshua Allen:

"Two different divisions in the same company may use what they *think* 
is the same namespace for their documents (and when they click on the
namespace name it sure enough connects them to the right place, so how
are they to know differently?).  Furthermore, all of their XML documents
work fine within their own department.  It is only two years later when
corporate IT tries to combine those documents that things break."

http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-tag/2003Apr/thread.html#122

Paul Prescod:

"the RDDL document could define the canonical form of the URI so that 
users could be warned when they use anything else."

http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-tag/2003Apr/0171.html

  Paul Prescod

Received on Tuesday, 3 June 2003 13:17:34 UTC