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

> 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.

Having thought about it further, I've decided that actually this line
of reasoning is quite offensive (although I accept that no offence was
intended).

If I go (as I have)

xmlns:x="x"
xmlns:y="y"
xmlns:z="z"

in an XSL stylesheet to get three namespaces called x y and z for
structuring some of the non-xsl top level elements in the stylesheet.
Then what I "meant to say" is what I said. Since namespace names
are not intended for dereferencing (in general and certainly not by
a namespace parser, or xslt system) then there was no implication
of any files called x y and z being anywhere, the namespaces are just
called that. Namespaces can be called anything that is syntactically a
URI reference. If I choose not to choose names that are globally
unique, then so be it.
If someone (for example me) goes to some lengths to
write documents conforming to a W3C recommendation, then it is
not up to the W3C to declare that I shouldn't have done that.

If some overriding need arises they may have to change the spec and
invalidate (or change the meaning of) my documents, but if so they
should just say so and apologise, not try to make out that I was
in anyway wrong to have followed their earlier specification.


Actually as this example is based on xpath it is arguable that
the absolute interpretation should have been applied anyway (although
I'd dispute that, since xpath refers to namespace in a normative
fashion). The stylesheet itself would of course work anyway with the
absolute interpretation, but any stylesheet that was written to query
into this document would break. The absolute interpretation makes
essentially all documents that have relative namespace names become
unusable with xpath or xslt as you never know what the namespace will
be, and if as here the files are on the file system, the namespace
in the file would depend on the application that reads the file.

David

Received on Friday, 9 June 2000 03:20:13 UTC