Re: How namespace names might be used

At 02:07 PM 6/17/00 -0500, Al Gilman wrote:
>Point of procedure:
>
>John Aldridge asked for some help understanding what people were thinking.
>That is the request to which I responded.  I gave him a brain dump on how I
>view the relationship between namespaces and XML language/languages.  He
>thanked me [off the list].
>
>I didn't ask anyone else to salute my vision or bless it as the consensus
>of this group.  

Thanks very for the clarification, Al - that was not clear from your 'brain
dump', which didn't assign ownership to the (deeply contentious)
perspective it described.

>I am concerned that Simon mis-read the intent of my remarks.  I agree with
>Simon that the following quoted points of rough agreement are quite enough
>agreement to separate the upper and lower layer problems and deal
>separately with the lower layer issue of how a parser should distinguish
>among prefixed names in a given context.
>
>[Simon]
>>I think it's reasonable to assert that 'distinguish' is the only part we're
>>arguing over in the 'absolutize' | 'forbid' | 'literal' discussion.
>
>[Al] That's what I want people to agree to.  The namespace Rec. seems to
>have been read by some to say something else.
>--
>[Al]
>>>The lower layers should not need nor presume to recognize the namespace.
>>>Only distinguish the different namespaces appearing in one parse or one
>>>document.
>[Simon]
>>We agree, for once!  (There's still the ugly question of how to
>>distinguish...)
>[Al]
>>>Match patterns in stylesheets refer to names in the space of the document
>>>that is being style-processed.  They are name acceptors, not name creators.
>[Simon]
>>Okay.

I think this listing summarizes about the _only_ points of agreement we
have, and I think the rest of the 'clarification', despite your attempts to
find common ground, merely demonstrates how extraordinarily different our
perspectives are, yet again.  

Philosophically, we're on different planets.  I don't have a concept of
'language' that meshes well with your concept, only 'words'.  The
implications of that are more severe than you seem willing to accept.  If
you want to build your language on words, fine - but I don't need a concept
of language to use words.  

At this point, I think it's time to drop explicit consideration of the
needs of the 'upper layers', as it's painfully obvious that we have rather
different visions of what those layers are doing, and focus on the bare
minimum needed to let us do our work.  I'd suggest that comes down to one
key word - distinguish.

Sadly, I don't think it's even clear how 'distinguishing' works.  

Simon St.Laurent
XML Elements of Style / XML: A Primer, 2nd Ed.
http://www.simonstl.com - XML essays and books

Received on Saturday, 17 June 2000 14:07:54 UTC