The questions and their relationship

These discussions have dealt with several different questions.  I

think it would be helpful to enumerate them (without prejudice to the answers)

and to verify my hypothesis that the answers to these questions are independent,

i.e., answering one question does not constrain the answer to any other

question.

The questions I'm seeing are:

1. Should relative URIs be disallowed, possibly through deprecation, as
namespace names in the sense of the Namespace Specification?

2. When comparing URI's for equality, should the comparison be based on their
literal string representation, possibly after some simple normalizations, or
should it be based in some way (possibly using absolutization for relative
URI's) on what resource those URI's refer to?   (Different specs appear to
suggest different answers.)

3. Should the URI reference in a namespace attribute point to a resource of
some kind that at least hints at (and perhaps defines completely) the meaning
of the names used within that namespace, or should it have only the
significance of a unique identifier?   The Namespace Specification
categorically says that its only significance is that of a unique identifier,
but TimBL has suggested that this answer may be the wrong one.

Does that cover the principal questions we're examining?   Are the answers
independent, as it seems to me they are?

Paul Abrahams

Received on Thursday, 18 May 2000 15:03:24 UTC