Re: Mechanism, not policy [was: Attribute uniqueness...]

> Huh? Joe's statement isn't the literal interpretation; it's
> the absolutize interpretation, no?

Joe answered already, but this:
>    > It explains the fact that ..\light lights a bulb in one case and a
>    > fuse in another as being an _intentional_ result of the decision to use a
>    > context-dependent reference in the first place. The answer "if it hurts
>    > when you do that, don't do that" really is consistant with this model.

Is essentially the rationale for the literal interpretation.

If someone uses "../light" as a namespace name then they either don't
care what if anything it refers to (this is the case for any namespace
processing), and if they intend, after namespace processing, to use
the namespace name to reference some resource then they presumably
_intended_ the resource to depend on context.

This is what the literal interpretation gives you.


Saying that the namespace name produces different resources depending
on context is exactly the same (by definition) as saying a relative
URI will, depending on the context dereference a different resource.

In the absolute interpretation the namespace name is for some
unexplained reason not taken as the supplied string but as
the absolute URI that it resolves to. This means that despite
the author having specified a relative URI the same resource is
always located by the namespace name in all contexts. This is
just bizarre, if that had been the intention then an absolute URI
could have been used in the first place.

Basically the absolute proposal comes from a fundamental
misunderstanding of the namespace rec:
That a namespace with name a particular URI _is_ the resource
identified by that URI. 

That is just false. If it were true then you would need the forbid
option as relative URI don't refer (in themselves) to resources. If
the namespace with _was_ the resource with URI equal to the namespace
name then clearly xmlns="foo" would be undesirable as the namespace is
(at most) one thing but the relative URI refernce "foo" identifies
different things depending on context.

But that is not the situation. Namespaces have names which are URI
references. That does not mean that they are the resources identified
by those references, anymore than (to reuse an example I used before)
than machines in nag which are named after english towns _are_ towns.

The namespace name in

<x xmlns="http://www.w3.org" />

just is the URI of the W3C home page. That resource doesn't aquire any
properties of a namespace just because I used it's identifier as a
namespace name.

David

Received on Wednesday, 7 June 2000 16:51:07 UTC