Re: Is a namesapce a resource? - was: duck

>But that assumes already the most contentious issue
>the rec does not define the namespace name to be in URI space it
>defines it to be a URI reference.

Granted. Except that what the rec really intended was not even that; it was
supposed to define the namespace name as something that looked like a URI
plus an optional #locator suffix. Overstating the case is what got us into
this.

Having said that, I think I can see where Tim B-L & Co. are coming
from.Since the spec does say it's a reference -- however unintentional that
may have been -- I can't blame them for trying to "drop the other shoe" and
say "and what it refers to is really the Namespace".

I strongly dislike some of the impliations of that, specifically in the
fact that it makes relative-syntax namespace declarations a poor choice.
For that reason, I would prefer to Forbid relative syntax, at which point
the distinctions between the other options become moot. And it sounds like
a weak from of Forbid -- namely the Deprecate/Undefined proposal -- may in
fact be acceptable to a wide enough population.

I'm less certain than I once was about my second choice. I understand the
architectural argument laid out above, but I still strongly dislike the
idea of burning cycles to support something that almost everyone now agrees
was a bad idea in the first place.

>in this analogy the namespace name isn't the address it's the offset
>to it.

I think I've decided that using an offset as a name is Just Plain Dumb. The
question is whether it's worth doing the work to support "what the user
probably meant to say", or declaring that they shouldn't have said it in
the first place.

> If namespace names are URI references, and ./foo is a URI
>reference then ./foo is a namespace name. This is not inconsistent

ALL THREE OPTIONS ARE CONSISTENT. That's the problem. If we can manage to
eliminate any one of them we can probably reach a compromise on the
remaining two... but with all three active, any compromise will be
unacceptable to someone.

Received on Thursday, 8 June 2000 17:46:51 UTC