Re: relative URIs for namespaces

David Brownell wrote:
> 
> What would the semantics of a relative URI in an "xmlns...='...'"
> declaration be?  That is, what's the base URI with respect to
> which such a URI must be interpreted -- the document in which
> it's found?  Or are relative URIs not allowed?

I would prefer not to allow relative URIs here.  I can't think why
anyone would want to have a namespace URI relative to a document. It's a
bit of a pain to implement (at least for some kinds of implementation).
It requires the implementation to interpret the namespace URI rather
than just treaingt it as an opaque string.  It also removes the
ambiguity with xmlns="" caused by the empty string being a legal
relative URI.  Also I suspect many of the URIs used with namespaces in
the long term will be non-hierarchical and thus unuseable with relative
URIs.  If we were going to allow relative URIs, I think we should
provide a way to specify what the base is.

James

Received on Tuesday, 25 August 1998 22:28:55 UTC