- From: Tim Bray <tbray@textuality.com>
- Date: Wed, 09 Apr 2003 11:58:27 -0700
- To: Larry Masinter <LMM@acm.org>
- Cc: "'Paul Cotton'" <pcotton@microsoft.com>, www-tag@w3.org, "'Paul Grosso'" <pgrosso@arbortext.com>, roy.fielding@day.com
Larry Masinter wrote:
> Let me turn this around: why do you think it's important to stamp
> out the practice of using "urn" URIs for namespace names?
I don't. A namespace name is advertised as being a URI and a URN is a
URI and thus it's legal and it would be counter-productive to try to
stomp it out.
However I'm cheerfully prepared to argue on engineering grounds that for
every actual case I've ever encountered of an XML namespace, an http URI
is a better choice for a name, simply because it offers the possibility
of, using robust and ubiquitous technology, publishing human- and
machine-readable information about the namespace.
And I continue to think that permanence is an artifact of publisher's
intention and community practice, rather than what comes before the
first ":".
And I do acknowledge that there are people who seem to want namespace
names that are guaranteed *not* to be dereferencable, and some URN
namespace is probably a way to achieve that goal; but I've never been
able to understand why this would ever be a sensible goal.
--
Cheers, Tim Bray
(ongoing fragmented essay: http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/)
Received on Wednesday, 9 April 2003 14:58:29 UTC