RE: A little courtesy, please (resource questions)

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Dan Connolly [mailto:connolly@w3.org]

> One can consider a base URI to be a property of an XML document,
> or as something to be associated with an XML document. I'm not at
> all sure that the XML 1.0 spec clearly distinguishes these. The
> XML Infoset draft specifies that the [base URI] is a property
> of an XML document, and that's the way I'm using the term.
> 
> http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/WD-xml-infoset-19991220#infoitem.document

This reference states "[base URI] The absolute URI of the document entity,
as computed by the method of RFC 2396 [RFC2396], if that is known."  This
indicates to me that there may not be a base URI property, or that it's
value may be null.  My understanding is that without a base URI
absolutization cannot occur, and absolutized namespace names cannot be
determined.

> Anyway... as specified in the infoset draft, if you copy
> the characters of an XML document from one place to another
> in the web, the result is a different XML document.

Fine, nobody's not contesting that.  But absolutization implies that copying
an XML document from one place to another also may result in a document that
is no longer namespace-compliant XML, or that is a different document type
and so processors (e.g. stylesheets) for that document type fail.