[namespaceDocument-8] 14 Theses, take 2

During the TAG telecon this morning, there was some discussion
of my theses on namespace documents.  Someone made the wild claim
that there was consensus on most points, which to be fair seems
a little unlikely since they had been published for considerably
less than 12 hours at the time.

Having said that, Paul Cotton had an issue with thesis 7 "Definitive
material is normally distributed among multiple resources", offering
the counter-example of "lightweight" namespaces he and colleagues
routinely cook up for a list of words or the functions in an API
or something, that typically only come with a chunk of text. 
Seems fair; I redrafted section 7 to acknowledge this case.  [I 
don't think it weakens the arguments for any of the following theses].

Several people had trouble with thesis 14 "Namespace documents
should not be schemas"; mostly it seemed, based on lack of agreement
as to what a schema is or should be.  I've redrafted that one to
make it clear that we're talking about the mostly-syntactic schemas
of today (e.g. DTDs, XML Schemas), what the world calls schemas
today - and put the word "schemas" in quotes in the thesis statement.

Finally, Dan Connolly had an issue with Thesis 13 "Namespace
documents should not favor the needs of any one application or
application class" which I never got time to understand. Dan?
 -Tim

Received on Monday, 18 February 2002 16:50:56 UTC