Re: Comments on the architecture doc

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Tim Bray" <tbray@textuality.com>
To: <www-tag@w3.org>
Sent: Monday, January 14, 2002 12:30 AM
Subject: Comments on the architecture doc


> Two comments on the #Namespaces section:
> 
> (1) The relationship between languages & namespaces is I
>      think still poorly understood.  The assertion that there
>      is a 1-to-1 mapping is unproven.  This has a real-world
>      application in the context of the recent communication from
>      XMLProtocol - I don't think we're ready to write down the
>      rules yet for the interaction between namespaces and
>      media types.


I think this has to be defined really as soon as possible.
It is on the agenda for Monday.

> (2) Quote: "The namespace document (with the namespace URI) is
>      a place for the language publisher to keep definitive material
>      about a namespace. Schema languages are ideal for this."
>      I disagree quite strongly.  Schema languages as they exist
>      today represent bundles of declarative syntactic constraints.
>      This is a small subset of "definitive material".

I agree completely.  I suppose I was using schema langauges
in a rather stronger sense, in which I would include RDF-schema.,
OWL, and RDDL.

In general, a machine-processable document about the language
which can say things with whatever level we have learned to do so,
and certainly which can reference other documents.

(When you get to the daml:equivalentTo relation, then you are
actuallystarting to define what a language means -- not absoluteley
(that is onloy possible in mathematical cases) but relatively.)

>   RDDL (see
>      http://www.rddl.org) represents my current thinking as to what
>      a "namespace document" ought to be like.
>   Following the above
>      quotation, the document goes on to say lots of things I agree
>      with and which clearly stretch beyond the domain of schema
>      languages.
> 
> The "#Hypertext Link Topology" section feels a little out of
> date to me.  Having said that, I think the proper relationship
> between RDF and the future of hypertext is something that still
> needs lots of thinking and experience.

It is easier to fo the human-oriented hypertext side
or the machine-oriened relational side than to look at mixing them.

> The above excepted, this all feels like valuable bootstrap
> material.  -Tim
>

Received on Friday, 1 February 2002 19:48:17 UTC