Re: Significant W3C Confusion over Namespace Meaning and Policy

However, it does seem like a namespace document would be a sensible place 
to put such a schema, although - of course - it's not required. One could 
put the schema anywhere - however,  then the question is how to find it.
DocBook documents could be defined by their schema, and one could
find the schema in the namespace document 
(http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/...) or somewhere else entirely, like 
your hard drive. I think the reason people are talking at cross-hairs is
that they think the pro-"namespace document" camp are saying that it would 
be useful to upgrade RDDL or something like it to help with versioning 
issues, and the anti-"namespace document" camp thinks that we want to make 
having a namespace document a necessary condition of the namespace 
URI - which as the spec says and use shows, is obviously not true. 
However, as a *optional* place to put things like versioning info, a 
namespace document seems just as good as a URI.


 				-harry


On Thu, 17 Feb 2005, Norman Walsh wrote:

> / Harry Halpin <hhalpin@ibiblio.org> was heard to say:
> | 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. If a namespace can have an infinity of names, then
> | perhaps this should be repaired in a new spec, since having an
> | infinity of names makes versioning difficult. Either one has a
> | separate URI for each version, or a representation is returned by
> | the URI that contains the versioning information.
>
> In the general case, I simply do not believe that there is any
> relationship between the namespace name and the set of terms in the
> namespace.
>
> Consider the case of DocBook. DocBook V5.0 will be in a namespace. I
> do not expect that namespace to change. Ever. It will be the namespace
> for V5.0, V5.1, V6.0, ... V17.3, etc. ad nauseum, of DocBook.
>
> If the document you have in hand validates against the DocBook V5.3
> schema, it is a DocBook V5.3 document. If it validates (instead of, or
> also) against the V5.0 schema, it is a DocBook V5.0 document. Turning
> that around, as a consequence of the versioning policy of the DocBook
> Technical Committee, I can predict that every V5.0 document will also
> be V5.3 document.
>
> This is not the only possible namespace/versioning strategy, but for a
> bunch of practical reasons, it is the best policy for DocBook and I'd
> resist any attempt to define a general policy for namespace/versioning
> that prevented the DocBook policy.
>
>                                        Be seeing you,
>                                          norm
>
>

-- 
 				--harry

 	Harry Halpin
 	Informatics, University of Edinburgh
         http://www.ibiblio.org/hhalpin

Received on Thursday, 17 February 2005 16:11:45 UTC