RE: Significant W3C Confusion over Namespace Meaning and Policy

Another way to view that is that it is inherently confusing 
to use http URIs as syntax walls given that overloading the 
syntax more ubiquitously used for locators confuses people. 

It's a built in danger.  Always was.  Always will be.  
My advice is:

a) Do the right thing and put something at the location that 
settles the confusion such as pointing to the documentation 
of the namespace, and use a version attribute otherwise.  

b) It must be W3C policy that a namespace designer publishes 
the policy for updates to the namespace.  The form of that 
publication is left for innovation but it must be addressable.
No this has no teeth but that is true of W3C specs in general 
and that's ok.

There are three technical decisions that will bedevil 
the web architecture until the web itself is replaced:

1.  Grandfathering HTML.
2.  Reserving the xml: namespace.
3.  Using http URIs for namespace names.

There are sufficient reasons for all of these except 
possibly item one because it is a social compromise, 
but we'll pay in friction for all three.  Get used to it.

len


From: www-tag-request@w3.org [mailto:www-tag-request@w3.org]On Behalf Of
Patrick Stickler

I'm afraid I don't entirely follow what you are referring to here.
Break how? I would suspect that if applications are breaking, then
they are making presumptions about the significance of the namespace
that are not strictly licensed by the specs.

Cheers,

Patrick

Received on Wednesday, 16 February 2005 14:23:48 UTC