Re: My action on namespaces

Norman Walsh wrote:
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> Here is my much belated draft of some text on namespaces[1] for the
> architecture document.

I think that this is great work!

In order to add some content to this message I would also suggest you 
say something about the fact that even after a RDDL document is provided 
for a URI, an XML processor or other agent has no responsibility to 
dereference a namespace URI unless it needs information that it doesn't 
have locally and wants to look for it through the namespace URI's 
representation.

There is a common sort of fallacy that goes: "if there is a document 
provided at a URI it becomes your responsibility to get it." This leads 
to the fallacy that the reference needs to state whether there is a 
referent or not so that you can decide whether to dereference or not. 
But in reality you dereference if you need to (or want to) and don't if 
you don't. The web server's owner's intent is irrelevant.

  Paul Prescod

Received on Tuesday, 12 November 2002 00:31:16 UTC