Re: RDFCore WG: Datatyping documents

From: "John F Schlesinger" <johns@syscore.com>
To: "John F. Schlesinger" <jborden@mediaone.net>
Cc: <www-rdf-interest@w3.org>; <www-rdf-comments@w3.org>
Sent: Tuesday, February 05, 2002 1:54 PM
Subject: RE: RDFCore WG: Datatyping documents


> My point is that http:.//www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema and
> http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema# are different namespaces.
>
> As you yourself said in your earlier contribution:
>
> "As you should know, and must realize, XML namespace names are compared by
> _literal string_ comparison, and not using any sort of URI
canonicalization
> scheme."
>
> If you stand by that, then these are _not_ the same namespaces.
>

Certainly!

While machines have no problem disambiguating URIs which differ by a single
character, people do. Binding the "xsd" prefix to a different URI than what
people expect causes problems _particularly_ when the URIs are close.

While this may be legal from an XML Namespaces perspective, it is poor form.
It goes against the principle of least surprise. I don't want to have to
think about all the reasons doing this may or may not cause a problem in any
situation one might consider, I just don't want to think about easy stuff
that can be avoided.

Doing this is sort of like me taking your email nickname, sure people can
look in the headers, but you can easily fool alot of people that won't
bother reading all the details. I did that in the past email just to make a
point, but if we all started impersonating eachother, sure we would be
following the SMTP protocol, but it is still bad form.

Jonathan

Received on Tuesday, 5 February 2002 15:42:05 UTC