Re: Can everyone be happy?

Henrick, I suspect you missed the part of the discussion which

a) Agreed that for purposes of interlinking a set of documents which is
always moved as a set, relative syntax makes perfect sense;

b) Agreed that for purposes of linking to something which may not be moved
as a part of that set, relative syntax is a disaster;

c) Pointed out that for many -- arguably most -- uses of namespaces, one or
more instances of the namespace identity are hardcoded into an application
(the XSLT namespace is typical), and effectively is NOT moved as part of
the selfcontained set of documents.

The fact that relative references are a good thing for some purposes does
not make them a good thing for all purposes. Namespaces are a purpose where
they are in most cases going to be a Very Bad Thing indeed. One can make
them meaningful... but the meaning you're forced to assign them flies in
the face of the original intent of namespaces to define a reliably
recognizable mechanism for grouping names.


A namespace is _NOT_ primarily a link. It's an identity. Unstable identity
is generally a bad thing, on the Web or anywhere else.

______________________________________
Joe Kesselman  / IBM Research