Re: Language = Namespace. was: How namespace names might be used

Julian Reschke wrote:

> Paul W. Abrahams wrote:
> > Tim Berners-Lee wrote:
> >
> > > - a namesapce is identified by a URI.  (That is, if any resource is
> > > identified by URI u, and a namespace is identified by URI u, then that
> > > resource *is* that namespace)
> >
> > To pursue the question of what you mean by that: are all URIs
> > equally suitable
> > for that purpose, assuming only that the URI is chosen so that one can be
> > reasonably confident of its uniqueness?   If not, how would you
> > distinguish the
> > suitable URIs from the unsuitable ones?  There certainly does not
> > seem to be
> > any agreement as to what if anything should be at the resource
> > identified by
> > the URI, if indeed such a resource exists at all.
>
> To pursue this even further:
>
> 1) The XSLT namespace name is an URI ref that currently points to an HTML
> document "describing" the XSLT namespace,
>
> 2) According to Tim, the HTLM documentation thus *is* the namespace,
>
> 3) Given an RDF document referring to that URI, does it make statements
> about a namespace, a language or an HTML document???
>
> 4) If all of them are *the same thing*, what happens if the HTML document is
> replaced by an XML schema document? (I think this happened recently @ the
> namespace RECs own URI).

And to take your point further yet: were we to agree (which of course we
[collectively] don't) that the namespace name should identify the namespace by
providing useful information about it, no application could put that property
to good use, since there is no agreement as to what in particular that useful
information should be (DTD, schema, HTML document, self-describing package,
prayer to the Almighty to reveal the meaning through divine inspiration?).

Paul Abrahams

Received on Monday, 19 June 2000 18:27:08 UTC