- From: Jim Whitehead <ejw@ics.uci.edu>
- Date: Thu, 1 Apr 1999 16:19:39 -0800
- To: gstein@lyra.org, WEBDAV WG <w3c-dist-auth@w3.org>
> This is really gross. The XML Namespaces spec seems to consider a > (namespace, name) pair as the unique value, rather than namespace+name. > Maybe I misread the XML spec. Don't hold anything back, tell me what you *really* think about it :-) > Doing it this way just doesn't seem Right. Why can't the DAV spec use > the ordered-pair approach? The two links that were posted at the start > of the thread only deal with the fact that the XML spec was included > into the DAV spec, rather than a discussion of *why* we use this > approach. Does anybody have a reference to a discussion on "why"? (or > can explain why?) One rationale is that the design group identified that this was a problem in earlier versions of the XML Namespace specification, and developed a mechanism for addressing the problem which worked, and would ensure interoperability across the wire. There was a perception that this wasn't a major problem, and that it was better to rapidly develop a mechanism that worked, than to spend a lot of time on it. Another rationale is that we wanted to stay true to the property model where a property is a name, value pair, where the name is a URI, and the value is a well-formed chunk of XML. Viewing an XML namespace + element as a namespace, element pair is different from saying they are concatenated, and hence capable of forming a URI. Since we wanted to marshall property names using a namespace + element pair, the concatenation approach better supported this marshalling. - Jim
Received on Thursday, 1 April 1999 19:27:16 UTC