ACTION-521: Taking "Disposition of Names in an XML Namespace" to Recommendation

I have for some time had:

ACTION-521: Figure out where we stand with 
http://www.w3.org/TR/2006/WD-namespaceState-20060329/ on the rec track

The referent of that URI is the First Public Working Draft "The Disposition 
of Names in an XML Namespace" W3C Working Draft 29 March 2006 (yes, 2006).

Feeling guilty, I'm now trying to sort out the history of ACTION-521. As 
best I can tell, what's gone on is: The TAG in January of 2006 published a 
Finding [1]. In March we published the first public working draft [2] with 
similar text, and that's what's mentioned in the action. So, that implies 
that we had agreed to put it on the Recommendation track, but I'm not 
immediately finding the record of the decision to do so.

A few months later, in May 2006, we closed the related TAG issue 
namespaceState-48 [3], pointing in the email to the finding [1], and making 
no mention of plans for a Recommendation.

It seems that in February of 2011, we reminded ourselves of the fact that 
we had for 5 years had a FPWD with no progress, and I took ACTION-521 to 
sort things out. This action assignment is somewhat confusingly buried [4] 
in a discussion that was focused mainly on Jonathan's work on metadata, and 
the scribe admits to being "somewhat uncertain what the topic is" just at 
that point. So, some ambiguity there.

As to the technical scope of the work, note that this is an extremely 
short, essentially 1 page finding.  Informally, the technical question 
discussed is whether namespaces are inherently open, in the sense that it 
is at least coherent to define new names in a namespace after initial 
deployment, or closed, in the sense that having a fixed set of defined 
names is inherent in being a namespace.  The finding gives an existence 
proof of at least one namespace (the http://www.w3.org/XML/1998/namespace), 
which has been extended (the "id" local name was added.) The finding 
concludes that namespaces can be open or closed, and that:

"Good Practice: Specifications that define namespaces SHOULD explicitly 
state their policy with respect to changes in the names defined in that 
namespace."

So, that's the scope of the finding or Recommendation. The question now is, 
do we wish to take this forward as a Recommendation?

I'm not aware of our having received any comments on the FPWD, but it's 
been a long time. If we do want to move forward, I need some TAG member to 
take responsibility for:

1. Looking for and responding to any old comments.

2. Researching the current state of play with respect to actual use of, 
extension of, and documentation of namespaces.

3. Presenting to the TAG an analysis of whether we should take essentially 
the existing text forward to CR, or perhaps directly to PR, or whether we 
should revise the text to produce a new working draft, or whether the 
effort should be abandoned after all.

Norm: as editor of this, do you have any recommendations?  I'm also cc:'ing 
Dan Connolly, on the chance that he'd remember something about this that 
I've forgotten. I'm also copying Ian so that he'll have every opportunity 
to chastise me for allowing our group to go years without updating this draft.

For now, I'll bump the date on my action a couple of weeks to allow for 
discussion, and then schedule telcon or F2F discussion, where we can take 
the needed formal decision.

Thank you.

Noah

[1] http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/doc/namespaceState-2006-01-09.html
[2] http://www.w3.org/TR/2006/WD-namespaceState-20060329/
[3] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-tag/2006May/000
[4] http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/2011/02/09-minutes#item05

Received on Thursday, 11 August 2011 01:01:57 UTC