Re: Significant W3C Confusion over Namespace Meaning and Policy

/ Mark Baker <distobj@acm.org> was heard to say:
| IMO, this means that one needs to consider the implications of adding a
| name to a namespace in the same way that one needs to consider minting
| a new media type if a backwards incompatible revision to a document
| format is produced.

I agree that the implications have to be considered, but that doesn't
always mean that the right answer is to change the namespace (or the
media type).

Consider the case of XSLT 2.0. It uses the same namespace name (and
would use the same media type, if XSLT 1.0 had had an official media
type) as XSLT 1.0, despite the fact that there are new elements and
that the semantics of some of the existing elements have changed.

The use of a version attribute means that an XSLT processor can "do
the right thing" (though what the right thing is varies a bit)
regardless of the fact that the vocabulary has changed.

In the case of the XML namespace, all of the defined items are
idependent, so I don't see the problem.

If you write software (or have written software) that will do
something weird and magical with xml:foobar that it wouldn't do with
xyzzy:foobar, I think your software has a bug.

                                        Be seeing you,
                                          norm

-- 
Norman.Walsh@Sun.COM / XML Standards Architect / Sun Microsystems, Inc.
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