RE: Request for status dump and issues check

> * One of those concerns was that there didn't seem to be a strong "is not
> equal" test for URIs, which Namespaces require.

To be careful, the concern is that there is not a test that you can
perform on two URIs (uniform resource identifiers) to determine whether
the resources identified by them are "the same".

However

IF (1) we limit the space of possible namespace names such that,
  once a URI reference is used as a namespace name, no other URI reference
  that could possibly identify 'the same' namespace would ever be used
THEN (2) we can use character-by-character equality of URI references as the
  test to determine whether two namespace names are the same.

One simple way to accomplish (1) is to include the URI reference
  used to identify the namespace as part of the namespace definition.

> * Others had pointed out that some URIs, such as mailto:fred,  are
> "relative" even though they don't use relative syntax. But the
> "if it hurts
> when you do that, stop doing that" argument seems valid for that case; if
> you want a reference to a specific namespace rather than a family of
> namespaces, you shouldn't use relative syntax and you shouldn't use these.

We could have a long debate about whether we're going to just say that
these are "a bad idea" or whether they're "disallowed", but given that
the means of publication is a "W3C Recommendation" rather than a "W3C
Standard",
I think the distinction is moot: the recommendation should disallow them.
Software that uses them  won't follow the recommendation, boo hoo.

Michael Mealling wrote:

# BUT, http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform and
# http://WWW.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform are equivalent URIs and IMHO,
# the namespace document should inherit that equivalence rule, not
# try and come up with its own...

The namespace document should disallow XML-document creators from ever
using more than one of these, so that XML-document recievers can use
string-equality for determining namespace equality.

Larry

Received on Monday, 5 June 2000 15:16:12 UTC