RE: Significant W3C Confusion over Namespace Meaning and Policy

From: www-tag-request@w3.org [mailto:www-tag-request@w3.org]On Behalf Of
Harry Halpin

>While I agree that Henry is technically correct (technically as in "read 
>the specification"), this giant perma-thread clearly shows that there are 
>simply problems in keeping track of versioning with namespaces.

It's just a bit weirder if one tries to solve this with one stroke but 
it points to the problem of static plots for dynamic system motions.  

An instance has to conform to multiple dynamic namespaces with 
multiple authorities with different policies.  Syncing those 
is probabilistic at best but impossible without controls.

One is the xml:namespace which has implications to a universally shared 
processor TYPE, the xml processor.  Depending on the sharing of 
semantics, some namespace niches have more importance (reach) than 
others and should have stronger controls.   This is a fairly classic 
cybernetic control problem of degrees and connection strength.  It 
is soluable if the namespace authority provides the control.  Then 
it is a question of control types.

It appears to weaken the case for non-validating systems because 
there is at least one namespace that you always want to validate, 
the xml namespace (depending on rate of change) and possibly others. 
You could use a publish/subscribe model: if the authority makes a change, 
it broadcasts that to all depending nodes (update on notify). So 
it is something like RSS/RDDL.

That feels rube goldbergian, so don't take that on face value. 
A version att is simpler with schemas at the URI location.

len

Received on Wednesday, 16 February 2005 21:16:12 UTC