Re: Re: URIEquivalence-15 and IRIs

At 11:33 AM +0000 7/9/02, Anthony B. Coates wrote:

>While I appreciate the correctness of your interpretation, its 
>counter-intuitiveness should (I hope) make it unacceptable as a 
>final solution.  We already have enough issues arising from people 
>ignoring the social consequences of suggesting that the best 
>practice for namespace names is to use a URI, while simultaneously 
>insisting that any such namespace URLs must be treated as 
>dereferenceable locations.  If we add to that the non-processing of 
>%-escapes, it will just make XML namespaces even less approachable 
>to that overwhelming majority of the world who cannot count 
>themselves among the namespace cogniscenti.
>

Unfortunately that horse has left the barn. The namespaces spec 
already states that namespace URIs are compared character for 
character. Current interpretation of that and current software 
practice is that ~ and %7e and %7E are *not* the same.

While I agree it would have been a good idea to fix this back when 
namespaces was invented, doing so now would be a disaster even worse 
than the post facto assignment of a namespace URI to the xmlns 
prefix. The world would be divided into software that supported the 
namespaces spec and software that supported the IRI spec. You could 
not do both. Worse yet, there would be no marker indicating which 
version any given document or application used. It is more important 
here to stick with the original behavior than to do the optimal thing.
-- 

+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
| Elliotte Rusty Harold | elharo@metalab.unc.edu | Writer/Programmer |
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|          XML in a  Nutshell, 2nd Edition (O'Reilly, 2002)          |
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|  http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN%3D0596002920/cafeaulaitA/  |
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Received on Tuesday, 9 July 2002 08:51:33 UTC