Re: WD-xml-names-19980916

At 02:28 PM 9/15/98 +0700, James Clark wrote:
>It needs to reference the recently published RFC 2396, which is the
>definitive generic URI syntax spec.
>
>If we are allowing fragment identifiers in namespace identifiers (I
>think we agreed this, right?), then the correct term to use per RFC 2396
>is "URI reference" not URI.

James is correct on the above and I plan to make the changes in the
draft.

>The WD still fails to address the issue of relative URIs.  Are these
>allowed, and if so what is the base URI to be used for resolving them?

I think the sense of the group was to allow them (personally, I disagree,
so what) but that we hadn't progressed to articulating what the
base URI was.  I would argue that self-evidently the rules have to
be per RFC whatever, i.e. document-relative.  Is there a neat way
to say this without writing too much?

>The NSDecl production is bogus because it is is inconsisent with
>allowing the xmlns attributes to be defaulted.  This was pointed out by
>David Brownell; it's a serious point and in my view must be fixed before
>this WD is released.

I'll review the correspondence - is this just an editorial change?

>I don't think "markup vocabulary" is a term that can be used without
>explanation.  The term used in other W3C specs is "vocabulary".  In any
>case this should be explained, or a reference given (eg to
>http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-webarch-extlang).  The critical point is that
>this is not about reusing markup (syntax).  Lots of people have got
>really confused about this, and I don't think the changes go far enough
>to fix this.
>
>In "it is better to re-use this markup rather than re-invent it", it
>should say "markup vocabulary" not "markup".

OK, I think James wins; I'll rewrite something closer to his original
suggested wording unless someone objects.

>I don't think the lexical equivalence definition "Note that namespace
>names are URIs, the governing RFCs for which contain rules for
>establishing lexical equivalence" is workable.  This is way too vague
>and open-ended for interoperability.   If some implementations treat
>"http://WWW.W3.ORG/" as the same as "http://www.w3.org/" and some don't,
>we will not have interoperability. It's not realistic to requires
>implementations of namespace processors to know about all URI schemes. 
>I think lexical equivalence should just be defined as
>character-for-character identity.

This is a nontrivial issue of policy.  I think that going for either
character-by-character equivalence (in regards which we should
reference the as-yet-unpublished i18n WG work) or lexical
equivalence per the UR* RFC's is plausible and consistent, and
neither seems dramatically better to me.  Who gets to make this 
decision?  -Tim

Received on Friday, 18 September 1998 01:07:16 UTC