Re: XHTML -- Namespaces

-----Original Message-----
From: David Brownell <db@eng.sun.com>
To: www-html-editor@w3.org <www-html-editor@w3.org>
Cc: murray.altheim@eng <murray.altheim@eng>
Date: Monday, 1 March, 1999 9:49 AM
Subject: XHTML -- Namespaces



>On the other hand, the precedent being set by this use of XML
>namespaces is to make each potential combination of element
>vocabularies -- rather than each vocabulary, e.g. XHTML, SMIL, CBL,
>and so on -- have a different namespace.  Such a factorial explosion
>is very bad to design into a base architecture.  When ten different
>vocabularies can be combined, almost four million namespace
>URIs would need to be defined!

Minor correction -- the explosion is huge, and not strictly factorial.

1 vocabulary --> 1 URI
2 vocabularies --> 3 URIs (both, plus either one alone)
3 vocabularies --> 7 URIs (all, 3 pairs omitting each one, 3 singletons)
... etc

Were it factorial, that'd be 1, 2, 6 ...   I'm
too lazy this AM to work out the exact formula, but the point
remains that this notion of defining a namespace URI for each
overlapping set of XML vocabularies is nonscalable!!

- Dave

Received on Monday, 1 March 1999 14:02:36 UTC