Re: Significant W3C Confusion over Namespace Meaning and Policy

Exactly!

And if some application encountered a term grounded in
the Docbook namespace (sans any indication of a particular
version of the Docbook document model) and tried to
find out how to interpret that term by dereferencing
the namespace name URI, (presumably) getting a namespace
document, that namespace document would not be able to
tell the application how to properly interpret that term.
The application might thus be aware of various options,
but ultimately, it would have to guess.

The same is true for a human reading the same namespace
document.

What counts is that it is clear which version of which
model must be used to interpret the data, and ideally,
each version of each model would be identified by a
distinct URI which is communicated to the recieving
agent and via which, information specifically about
that particular version of that particular model could
be obtained.

Patrick


On Feb 17, 2005, at 17:57, ext Norman Walsh wrote:

> / Harry Halpin <hhalpin@ibiblio.org> was heard to say:
> | While I agree that Henry is technically correct (technically as in
> | "read the specification"), this giant perma-thread clearly shows
> | that there are simply problems in keeping track of versioning with
> | namespaces. If a namespace can have an infinity of names, then
> | perhaps this should be repaired in a new spec, since having an
> | infinity of names makes versioning difficult. Either one has a
> | separate URI for each version, or a representation is returned by
> | the URI that contains the versioning information.
>
> In the general case, I simply do not believe that there is any
> relationship between the namespace name and the set of terms in the
> namespace.
>
> Consider the case of DocBook. DocBook V5.0 will be in a namespace. I
> do not expect that namespace to change. Ever. It will be the namespace
> for V5.0, V5.1, V6.0, ... V17.3, etc. ad nauseum, of DocBook.
>
> If the document you have in hand validates against the DocBook V5.3
> schema, it is a DocBook V5.3 document. If it validates (instead of, or
> also) against the V5.0 schema, it is a DocBook V5.0 document. Turning
> that around, as a consequence of the versioning policy of the DocBook
> Technical Committee, I can predict that every V5.0 document will also
> be V5.3 document.
>
> This is not the only possible namespace/versioning strategy, but for a
> bunch of practical reasons, it is the best policy for DocBook and I'd
> resist any attempt to define a general policy for namespace/versioning
> that prevented the DocBook policy.
>
>                                         Be seeing you,
>                                           norm
>
> -- 
> Norman.Walsh@Sun.COM / XML Standards Architect / Sun Microsystems, Inc.
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Received on Friday, 18 February 2005 08:33:08 UTC