Re: Proposal for Changing Element and Property Names

Accidentally caught by the spam filter.

- Jim

-----Original Message-----
From:	David G. Durand [SMTP:david@iris.dynamicdiagrams.com]
Sent:	Saturday, January 31, 1998 8:00 PM
To:	'Terry Allen'; w3c-dist-auth@w3.org
Subject:	[Spam?] Re: Proposal for Changing Element and Property Names

On Jan 31, 12:02pm, Yaron Goland wrote:

> Having been on the wrong end of making categorical statements which are just
> flat out wrong I won't dwell. However you may wish to learn from my
> experience. Try saying things in the form of "Hum... I haven't seen this XML
> name space extension mechanism before, where can I find a reference?" That
> way if it doesn't exist you have made your point, but if it does, you don't
> sound silly.
>
> You can find the W3C announcement of this namespace mechanism along with a
> link to the draft, in the post Jim Whitehead, our group chair, put out on
> this group -
> http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-dist-auth/1998JanMar/0106.html

As Terry noted, this has no force except as something to think about that may
or may not ever become a standard. It's about as definitive as a random
individual internet-draft.

I think I've posted about this to the list before. In any case, I've certainly
had some private mail with Jim about it.

   In short, the namespace mechanism is not only not a standard yet; it's also
not a shoo-in for standards status, as msny (invlude me, I'm afraid) are not
convinced that there is a case that it meets a need not already met in XML. In
particular, the structured use of attribute values a la the SGML/HyTime notion
of "architectural forms" can meet the concrete requirements of namespaces as
they are currently stated. I'm not a big fan of the Architecture declarations
chosen by HyTime, but the same basic idea could be greatly simplified and still
meet the global uniqueness and semantics assignment requirements that _seem_ to
be the goals of namespaces. And they don't require any extension to the XML
syntax and thus to XML parsers.

The proposal is worth the effort XML has devoted to it (allowing ":" characters
in names, and reserving them for experimental use in case some namespace
proposal comes to pass). Whether anything will come of it remains to be seen.

At the moment extreme caution may be in order so that DAV doesn't end up being
held hostage to the standardization of a ferature that it may not even need!

I would be happy to post the thread Jim and I had in private if he doesn't
mind.

    -- 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 Sunday, 1 February 1998 23:30:40 UTC