- From: <rjelliffe@allette.com.au>
- Date: Mon, 23 Aug 2004 17:20:50 +1000 (EST)
- To: www-tag@w3.org
I wonder if there is a enhancement to Namespaces that could substantially make it easier to come to grips with versioning. This is an architectural issue, therefore suited for TAG. I wonder if it should be possible (for schema processors & people) to imply base/derived relationships for the basic semantics of elements and attributes and documents based on the namespace URLS. So that http://www.eg.com/ns/html/html4 is consonant with http://www.eg.com/ns/html/ as is http://www.eg.com/ns/html/html3 but not http://www.eg.com/ns/svg (Whether this is done using / or using # or some other delimiter is up to the URL police. Ditto for how it relates to URIs.) At the moment, URLs are hierarchical in construction but not in function. We have expressive names, but we are cannot take advantage of them. By indicating the semantic hierarchy between namespaces, it can allow better fallbacks and default processing, thus (when supported by W3C specs and implementation) allowing people to adopt different namespaces for derived languages, rather than just the broad semantics (which is all that is prudent now). For example, you don't have a stylesheet or schema for http://www.eg.com/ns/html/html4 but you do have one for http://www.eg.com/ns/html/ ? Fall back to the second, user agent permitting. Cheers Rick Jelliffe
Received on Monday, 23 August 2004 07:28:55 UTC