Namespace, URIs, and other institutionalized names

I had a meeting with TimBL and others yesterday to get clarity on a couple
of W3C policies and requirements over specifications, one of which was
namespace policy. This tends to be a rather heated/religious issue, but at
least I have something that I and others reference -- or even take issue
with. <smile> You'll note one of the characteristics of this policy in the
W3C context is the W3C's commitment to maintaining our URIs, which I think
is a good thing.

Regardless, the namespace policy requires
"http://www.w3.org/1999/$something" and I expect I can get approval for a
namespace shorter than the one I originally proposed along the lines of 

        http://www.w3.org/1999/10/sig

or even

        http://www.w3.org/1999/sig

if we don't expect to issue different versions that need to co-exist and
have normative changes in their meaning within the space of a year. One
could even mix a version number in there, but I'm hesitant to propose that.

This discussion also has some ramifications on the URNs that we are
presently using, which I will address in the next message. 

Forwarded Text ----
 Date: Tue, 26 Oct 1999 15:43:13 -0500
 From: Dan Connolly <connolly@w3.org>
 To: chairs@w3.org
 Subject: Re: Namespace URIs and other institutionalized names
 
 Dan Connolly wrote:
 [...]
 
 > It might be nice if we had a policy/mechanism that allowed us
 > to delegate this decision, or a policy/mechanism that
 > allowed all namespace identifiers to be chosen in a similar
 > fashion, but we (currently) don't.
 
 As a result of some internal discussions, TimBL has written down
 some of the policy that has been emerging in his mind. You are
 hereby notified of the policy in:
 
 	URIs for W3C namespaces
 	Tim Berners-Lee, W3C Director
 	$Id: nsuri.html,v 1.10 1999/10/26 20:10:04 timbl Exp $ 
 	http://www.w3.org/1999/10/nsuri
 
 Feel free to cite it in public forums, and feel free to discuss,
 e.g. the philosophical aspects of URIs and persistence in the
 uri@w3.org forum, which is archived at:
 	http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/uri/
 
 (hmm... the RDF IG is possibly another relevant forum, due
 to the digital library and other metadata issues.)
 
 -- 
 Dan Connolly, W3C
 http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/
 tel:+1-512-310-2971 (office, mobile)
 mailto:connolly.pager@w3.org (put your tel# in the Subject:)
 
End Forwarded Text ----

_________________________________________________________
Joseph Reagle Jr.   
Policy Analyst           mailto:reagle@w3.org
XML-Signature Co-Chair   http://w3.org/People/Reagle/

Received on Wednesday, 27 October 1999 17:37:33 UTC