Re: How namespace names might be used

At 03:29 PM 6/10/00 -0700, Tim Bray wrote:
>But... the more I think about the packaging idea, the more it seems
>insufficiently flexible and general.  At the end of the day, it seems
>like all the different kinds of related resources (stylesheets, type
>definitions, procedural code, schemas) ought to somehow become active,
>and respond to call-by-name.  I.e. there ought to be a way to broadcast
>an appeal for stylesheets that can handle vocabularies named by 
>http://a.b.com/ns37, or Java classes that can generate audio output
>from vocabularies named http://a.b.com/ns39; this is a many-to-many
>mapping we're talking about here, because a stylesheet resource could
>probably "know about" a wide variety of vocabularies (e.g., DocBook
>derivatives) that it's capable of handling.  

I like this idea a lot, but I suspect we need to crawl before we walk
before we run.  While packaging might feel like crawling, it might be
enough to jumpstart us toward what you're talking about.

Think about these steps as a possible sequence:
1) Creating packaging documents, built on an XLink infrastructure but
provided with an understood and extensible set of semantics for describing
the content of those links.
2) Initially, parsers/processors/applications would be on their own as far
as downloading and processing the packaging documents, requiring all the
clunky processing you see as limiting.
3) As the limitations become clearer and the uses of packaging better
understood, the package documents are supplemented by a protocol that makes
it easier to share and handle them in the distributed manner you're
describing.  At this point, the packaging documents are just an input to a
larger system.

Is that plausible?

>Are any of the existing Internet protocols a candidate for this 
>kind of lookup-by-name?  I don't think content-negotiation goes nearly
>far enough.  Pardon me for blue-skying it.  -Tim

Sometimes blue-sky is what we've got.  I've had similar feelings about the
limitations of content negotiation for a long while.  It may take a new
protocol, at least to reach phase 3 of what I'm talking about above.


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 Sunday, 11 June 2000 10:32:41 UTC