Re: The trouble with absolutizing...

John Cowan wrote:


> ... is not that it's difficult, or expensive, or a Bad Thing.
>
> The trouble is simply that there are thousands of documents Out There
> which identify namespace names based on identical string matching,
> that will become broken if the rules are changed retroactively.

Are there really thousands of documents which will break? How specifically
will they break?

Rather, there may be some number of applications or xslt transforms which
might break, but how many?

Does anyone have specific knowledge of such documents or applications?

>
> These documents were issued in conformance with a W3C Recommendation,
> which is supposed to be stable, and people are supposed to be able
> to rely on it.
>
Credibility is better maintained by quickly admiting and fixing a problem
than knowingly continuing on a course that is destined to cause far worse
problems in the future.

Jonathan Borden