- From: Norman Walsh <Norman.Walsh@Sun.COM>
- Date: Mon, 11 Nov 2002 10:48:42 -0500
- To: www-tag@w3.org
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Here is my much belated draft of some text on namespaces[1] for the architecture document. XML vocabularies use URIs, as per Namespaces in XML, as "namespace names" to create globally unique element and attribute names. These URIs are identified in an XML document with a namespace declaration. Although the Namespaces Recommendation makes it clear that it is not <em>necessary</em> for the namespace name to be a retrievable resource, the "resource description" principle suggests that it <em>should</em> be a retrievable resource. Presented with a namespace name that it does not recognize, the URI is the only key that a person or application has to find out more about the namespace. The natural way to find out more about a resource identified by a URI is to dereference it. There are many reasons why a person or agent might want more information about the namespace. A person might want to * understand its purpose, * find out who controls it, * request authority to access it, or * report a bug or situation that could be considered an error An agent might undertake to retreive that information for a user, or it might be searching for other kinds of information, such as: * a schema to use for validation * a stylesheet to use for presentation * an ontology to use for making inferences, or * any number of other application-specific details It follows that there is, in general, no single type of resource that can be returned in response to a request for the namespace name that will always be the most appropriate. Consequently, it often makes sense to use some sort of hybrid document that indirectly provides access to a variety of resources as the document available from the namespace name. One example of such a hybrid document is RDDL. Note, however, that RDDL or a document like it, is no more universally correct than any other type of resource. For any particular namespace, there might be a single best answer (schema, ontology, HTML documentation, etc.), as determined by the developers of that namespace. Be seeing you, norm [1] http://www.w3.org/2002/09/24-tag-summary - -- Norman.Walsh@Sun.COM | The Future is something which everyone XML Standards Architect | reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, Web Tech. and Standards | whatever he does, whoever he is.--C. S. Lewis Sun Microsystems, Inc. | -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.0.6 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Processed by Mailcrypt 3.5.7 <http://mailcrypt.sourceforge.net/> iD8DBQE9z9FaOyltUcwYWjsRAjrTAJ4kvBDgzzo3CRXd1ENIe9ll1lOGCACfaL9k v2lVF9XmthawQSMVO8bnl9I= =1FYp -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
Received on Monday, 11 November 2002 10:51:58 UTC