Re: namespace usage as assertions

"Eve L. Maler" wrote:
> 
> At 12:08 PM 6/21/00 -0500, Dan Connolly wrote:
> >That's not the case. Every URI, by definition, identifies/points to a
> >resource.
> >URI means "Uniform Resource Identifier"; URIs identify resources.
> >cf RFC2396 for the exact definition.
> 
> If you're serious about "points to," then despite your urgings when we did
> the original Namespaces work, we should not have used URIs for namespace
> names because pointing to something was "not a goal."

There's a distinction between the resource that a URI identifies
and entities that may represent that schema; I don't seem to
be able to get that point across, no matter how many times
I cite the URI and HTTP specs. I'll try to paraphrase again,
slightly differently:

	a namespace name is a URI
	a URI identifies/points to a resource
	a resource may be represented by/described by an entity (such as a
schema
		document)

What is "not a goal" is "that it [a namespace name] be directly
usable for retrieval of a schema". That's quite different
from saying that it's not a goal that a namespace name
identifies/points to a resource.

And again: it's not a goal for the namespace spec; i.e. there's
no schema-spec functionality that relies on accessing a
resource. That doesn't contradict the fact that
http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml identifies a resource.
It does whether the www.w3.org web site is running or not.

And again: the namespace spec can't say with is not a goal for, for
example, the XML Schema spec nor the RDF schema spec etc.

-- 
Dan Connolly, W3C http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/