Re: [namespaceDocument-8] 14 Theses, take 2

Dan Connolly wrote:
> 
>...
> Thesis 13 (and 14) seems to say that it's necessary to pick
> one data format for all namespace documents. Not so;
> to each his own. And if my namespace is pretty special-purpose,
> what's wrong with using a special-purpose data format
> to document it?

There is the theory floating around that namespace documents should be
machine processable in the sense that code could go there and get
something useful to figure out how to process a multi-namespace
document. That would require a predictable way to get machine readable
information about of namespace documents.

I personally feel that we should not try to put machine-readable
information there until there is a model for how the machine would
actually go about looking information and using it for a particular
domain. For instance it certainly won't work to use the schema for SOAP
and the schema for XHTML to generate a meta-schema for SOAP+XHTML.
Putting a couple of RDF links in an XHTML document doesn't fix the
fundamental problem that people combine namespaces in unconstrained and
contradictory ways.

 Paul Prescod

Received on Monday, 18 February 2002 19:01:12 UTC