fundamental difference?

At 10:42 PM 6/2/00 -0400, Tim Berners-Lee wrote:
>uuuuh  Disagree.  Are we on the same wavelength?
>There are a large number of XML languages for describing the syntactic
>properties fo a namespace, which is all the XML level cares about anyway
>at this level.
>When you have a schema validator validating the schema for schemas,
>it is hard to say that namespaces about namespaces are all in the future.

I do not think that word means what you think it means.  ('namespace')

It doesn't mean that I'm right and you're wrong, but I think you have a
fundamentally different perspective of what a namespace is than a lot of
people on this list.

To me, a namespace is a convention, a convenience for providing uniquely
identifiable names.  There is no substance to a namespace, only a handy
signifier composed of characters in a namespace URI that can be attached to
other signifiers like element and attribute names.

To you, a namespace seems to be something concrete (as abstractions go),
something which has properties, meaning, all that other signified stuff.

At this point, your concrete namespaces seem awfully menacing to my
perception of namespaces.  It's not just that your namespaces have
substance, but that you somehow see that substance as having some kind of
moral force, without which namespaces are useless.

The Namespaces in XML spec still reads to me as a description of a
convention, not a definition of what a namespace is.  If you want to make
judgments based on this conception of a namespace having substance, I
strongly suggest that you run this conception through the full W3C process
rather than positing it as an axiom and making it the foundation of your
plans.

The disagreement is acceptable, but the consequences seem to infer an
endless circle that will spin unless properly put to rest.  If the full
process merely spins, at least some formal (and hopefully public) effort
was given to the task, and we can move on with a better understanding of
the disagreement, working around it as necessary.

Right now, we seem just plain stuck.

Simon St.Laurent
XML Elements of Style / XML: A Primer, 2nd Ed.
Building XML Applications
Inside XML DTDs: Scientific and Technical
Cookies / Sharing Bandwidth
http://www.simonstl.com

Received on Friday, 2 June 2000 22:57:59 UTC