Re: On, and on, and on...

At 11:51 AM 6/8/00 -0400, keshlam@us.ibm.com wrote:
>Quoth David G. Durand:
>>This misrepresents the history significantly. There was a typo that
>>allowed relative URI references, in an attempt to allow only for the
>>presence of fragment identifiers. The fact that URIs, as used for
>>namespaces, were not required to have any dereferencing semantics was
>>a clear and consistent goal of the group working on the standard, and
>>of Microsoft in proposing it (at least from an early date). The fact
>>that you have consistently disagreed with this notion is _not_
>>justification for calling it a "typo".
>
>He's got a point. It's an inconsistancy, and hence a design mistake. But if
>there's a _typo_ -- a purely editing mistake -- it was either in not
>realizing that URI References allowed relative syntax, or not explicitly
>saying that the name used the syntax of URI References without any
>implication about semantics, since we've been told repeatedly that Literal
>was the intent of the Namespace spec's authors.

Alas, the issue was brought up, on the public comments list, as James Clark
pointed out:
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/xml-uri/2000May/0218.html

I don't think it was a mere typo, but I wish it had been addressed then.

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 Thursday, 8 June 2000 13:54:30 UTC