Spirits of RDF and URI

At 09:58 AM 5/23/00 -0500, Dan Connolly wrote:
>Yes, to the letter of the specs as drafted, this is the case.
>His claim went to the sprit of RDF, and from what
>I can tell, the spirit of RDF is that xmlns works like href,
>where relative URI references aren't intended to be compared
>across documents without expanding them to absolute form.

That may be true, but I've yet to see evidence that the spirit of RDF is
relevant to XML namespace processing in general.

>> > Either namespaces are web resources in every sense of the word,
>> > and hence any sort of URI reference the author chooses
>> > may be used to point to them, or not.
>> 
>> You're overstating your case here.  Namespaces use URIs as names,
>
>Would that they did! The problem is that the spec says they
>use URI references for names:
>
>	"[Definition:] The attribute's value, a URI reference,
>	is the namespace name [...]"
>	-- http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/REC-xml-names-19990114/

The point remains the same, whether this is a URI reference or a URI - the
namespaces spec itself uses these only as names, without concern for the
resources they identify.

Simon St.Laurent
XML Elements of Style / XML: A Primer, 2nd Ed.
Building XML Applications
Inside XML DTDs: Scientific and Technical
Cookies / Sharing Bandwidth
http://www.simonstl.com

Received on Tuesday, 23 May 2000 11:09:08 UTC