RE: minor questions and quibbles on V4 spec

	From: Jim Davis <jdavis@parc.xerox.com>
	
	I'd just like to follow up on one point.
	
	>2.6.6 My current understanding is that the XML namespace element
	>supports scoped values. If this is indeed the case then it should be
	>documented in the XML spec and we need take no action. if it is not true
	>then we need to change our examples.
	
	I'd claim that the examples should not use this feature.  You can't assume
	that DAV readers will be XML experts.  DAV may be their first exposure to
	XML, and they will be applying "common sense" when reading the spec.  This
	XML feature is not totally obvious on first glance, therefore it adds
	complexity to the reading of the examples, and it only saves two characters
	per use, which is not worth the confusion in users.

This feature is also _not_ likely to be in XML. Final language has not
been approved on namespaces, but discussion has already led top
general agreement that only _+fully_ qualified names will have meaning
in the 1.0 version of XML. It is not clear what, if any, defaulting
rules are needed or possible to integrate with the rest of XML, and so
the minimization feature of scoping is not currently slated for inclusion.

The misunderstanding is very understandable, the original namespace
proposal included minimization, and the version on the web may still
do so, but that proposal was just one imput among many hundreds of emails,
and its unmodified form is not still under consideration.

	Given that one can already abbreviate the URI prefixes to a single letter,
	I would hope that anyone writing XML would write fully qualified names, and
	not rely on XML namespace scoping to make thier tags unambiguous.

This will probably be the only standard practice for some time,
although we hope that people will be experimenting with scoped
solutions (and their interaction with DTDs) in order to provide input
to the XML process.

  -- David
------------------------------------------+----------------------------
David Durand                 dgd@cs.bu.edu| david@dynamicDiagrams.com
Boston University Computer Science        | Dynamic Diagrams
http://www.cs.bu.edu/students/grads/dgd/  | http://dynamicDiagrams.com/
                                          | MAPA: mapping for the WWW

Received on Monday, 20 October 1997 13:26:00 UTC