Re: TB16 Re: Comments on arch doc draft

> Tim Bray:
> > The world would be an immensely 
> > better place if those were real URLs with real documentation at the end 
> > of them.

Michael Mealling wrote:
> But it would also be one that would simply quit working when the
> network connection went down. As someone else suggested: you're
> assuming web applications and XML and URIs get used in awfully
> unconnected places.

How could loss of *documentation* harm a processor?

How would (for example) a schema processor die if this document went
away:

 * http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema

How would an XSLT processor (for example) die if this document went
away:

 * http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform

As long as the referents are documentation or other things never or
seldom needed at runtime, network availability is irrelevant to the
software.

> Yes. The IETF has made very specific decisions not to turn the IANA's
> web resources into a directly downloadable schema repository. That's
> why we created the 'ietf' URN namespace and are putting permanent
> references to IANA registry entries there instead of making 'iana.org'
> follow the w3.org example. We _don't_ want things failing becuase
> the IANA decided to re-arrange its website. That's called a single
> point of failure and its _not_ what the Internet is supposed to have.

Tim isn't proposing a downloadable schema repository. Ignoring the
networking issues, there are technical reasons that that isn't likely to
work anyhow. We're talking about *documentation*.

---
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Received on Tuesday, 2 July 2002 11:58:42 UTC