Banning relative - No real damage?

The proposal is on the table that there would be no real
damage if relative URI-references were deprocated 

[...]
>http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/xml-uri/2000May/0229.html
>
><message>
><subject-line>The Moral Problem stated (was: Use cases)</subject-line>
>
>Michael Rys wrote:
>
>> The problem is, that people may chose or
>> may have chosen to make use of the literal interpretation of
>namespaceuri
>> comparisons for their own use over which we do not have control. They
>> authored their documents according to a valid W3C rec. If we go and
>change
>> that rec, the correction should not break their existing documents.
>
>This deserves to be written up in letters of gold, for it is the Moral
>Problem in a nutshell.


However, the practicaility of it that not one single instance of
a document has been brought as evidence that this is a real
problem.  Everyone pointed at Microsoft, and Microsoft produced an example
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/xml-uri/2000May/0145.html
which does *not* in fact use relative URIs.

<customer xmlns="x-schema:#Schema" CustomerID="ALFKI" CompanyName="Alfreds
Futterkiste" ContactName="Maria Anders" />

So while Microsoft software has been used as an example
which generates documents which would break were 
relative URIs to be absolutized before comparison,
the example is a counterexample: it would be unchanged.

Larry focusses the group with his question, "Are there any practical
considerations left besides deciding whether
we should 'disallow', 'deprecate' or 'define' the use of relative
URIs in namespace names?  Once you strip away all of the philosophical?"

If we can establish that no one has come forward with a specific
example which causes such a problem, then give that the imaginary
problem cases are quite obscure, one would conclude that banning
(in some way) relative URI-references for namesapces would
be practical and wise.  

And for the Infoset we can define a behaviour if the banned form
is met, of course.

Tim

Received on Monday, 5 June 2000 17:45:38 UTC