Re: How namespace names might be used

Dan Connolly wrote:

> Jelks Cabaniss wrote:
> > But ... the more fundamental question, framed even earlier by Walter Perry[2]
> > about the very assumption of this whole namespaces/semantics business, has never
> > been answered.
>
> There's a lot in that message. Could you state this "more fundamental" question
> briefly, please?

I'll do it myself, if I may quote my first posting to this list (on 15 May, the first
day of this discussion):

Tim Berners-Lee wrote:

> There are those who would maintain that a
> namespace should have no semantics, but I would say that then documents will
> have no semantics, and will  be useless to man or machine.  [You can go
> through the philosophical process of defining all semantics in terms of
> syntactic operations, of course, in which case the pedant can take the view
> that all is syntax, but it is not a helpful view when making this decision,
> as it leaves the main points the same and just gives a more difficult
> framework for most people to think of it].

I have argued for many months (e.g. http://xml.org/archives/xml-dev/2000/03/0380.html
) that semantics are local to the node where instance markup is processed and that the
XML family of specifications could (should!) aspire to no more than the specification
of syntax.
[http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/xml-uri/2000May/0006.html]

'Namespaces in XML' chose a syntactic solution which specifically disavowed URI
semantics. If the present debate is, as I believed it was originally framed, about
whether we should re-open the Namespaces spec in order to heap greater semantic
expectations upon the syntax there described, then the present forum might also
consider the question whether, in general, prescribing specific semantic expectations
of any particular syntax is a good, or even a workable, approach for a body such as
the W3C.

Respectfully,

Walter Perry

Received on Tuesday, 13 June 2000 10:58:48 UTC