REJECT: XPointer PR

The XPointer Framework Proposed Recommendation has language in it that I
do not consider acceptable and which I will simply reject in practice if
this wrong-headed notion survives to the Recommendation stage.

Section 3.3 states:
-------------------------
A scheme name consists syntactically of an optional Prefix and a
LocalPart, as defined in [XML-Names]. Abstractly, scheme names are a
tuple consisting of the LocalPart and the namespace name corresponding
to that Prefix in the namespace binding context. If the namespace
binding context contains no corresponding prefix, or if the (namespace
name, LocalPart) pair does not correspond to a scheme name supported by
the XPointer processor, the pointer part is skipped.

This specification reserves all unqualified scheme names for definition
in additional XPointer schemes defined in W3C Recommendations. The use
of QNames as scheme names provides a general framework for extensibility
by other XML-based media types wishing to use this framework in defining
their own fragment identifier languages. The definition of any scheme to
be used in conjunction with the XPointer framework must specify a name
for the scheme, consisting of a (namespace name, LocalPart) pair.
----------------------------

Apart from continuing to embroider the deeply-complicating notion of
QName processing ever deeper into the XML universe, this proposal
inflicts ever more verbosity on XPointers, burdening them with ever more
barriers to human editing and interpretation.

My favorite example uses the xmlns-local() scheme[1] I proposed
recently.  If forced to use this poisonous QName mechanism, what once
looked like:
#xmlns-local()[restOfXPointer]

suddenly explodes to:
xmlns(ns=http://simonstl.com/ns/bogus)xmlns-local()[restOfXPointer]

which is amusing at best.

This reservation serves no purpose whatsoever except to gild the W3C's
supposed control over a field in which it shows little or no interest in
future participation.  I strongly recommend striking this and leaving
such work to future development, wherever it may appear, unless the W3C
can demonstrate that it has genuine commitment to future generic XML
XPointer scheme development which might justify this restriction.

[1] - http://simonstl.com/ietf/draft-stlaurent-xmlns-local-frag-00.html


-------------
Simon St.Laurent - SSL is my TLA
http://simonstl.com may be my URI
http://monasticxml.org may be my ascetic URI
urn:oid:1.3.6.1.4.1.6320 is another possibility altogether

Received on Wednesday, 13 November 2002 16:33:19 UTC