Re: URIs quack like a duck

David Carlisle wrote:

> Any of the proposals that have been discussed on this list that would
> retrospectively change the meaning of these documents would destroy
> all credibility of W3C as a standards (or even recommendation) making
> body.

That's a more subtle issue than it appears on the surface, and the quack
title of this thread is appropriate.  Of course, if a proposal
retroactively changes the meanings of documents when those documents were
written ``to spec'', then there's a big problem.  But what if something in
the spec looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, but isn't a duck?  If
documents are based on reading something into a spec that isn't there, then
the obligation to preserve their meaning doesn't seem to me to be so
strong.

In the case of the namespace spec, the obligation to support any properties
of namespace names beyond the fact that they are syntactic URIs seems
questionable.

Paul Abrahams

Received on Thursday, 1 June 2000 10:01:29 UTC