Re: XBL Namespace uses the data: scheme

On Jun 30, 2006, at 5:59 AM, Robin Berjon wrote:
> On Jun 30, 2006, at 10:56, Charles McCathieNevile wrote:
>> Your first paragraph belies the second one - the single most 
>> important feature of a namespace is that it is a unique identifier.
>
> Correct, but mnemonic qualities of a string intended for human use can 
> hardly be sufficiently stressed. As it currently stands, the only 
> thing that beats the nsuri policy as example of what not to do here is 
> UUID URNs.

Hmm... I can think of a couple worse things:
   - having namespace URIs go 404
   - using the same namespace URI for two unrelated vocabularies

The YYYY convention is mostly motivated by the latter concern, though 
perhaps the fact that there's already a namespace document that shows 
that a name is reserved is sufficient to address both concerns, and not 
just the former.

[...]
>> That said, it is useful. w3.org/2006/xbl is, IMHO memorable enough
>
> I'm being dead serious when I say that having totally random years in 
> namespace URIs is the only thing I ever found genuinely difficult with 
> namespaces. If there had been a mnemonic assignment system instead of 
> a machine-oriented one I'm fairly certain that a fair percentage of 
> the complaints about namespaces would have vanished.

I wonder if you would be willing to serve as arbiter of the list of 
yearless namespace names.
How would you decide when to give one out?

I still have my reservations, but I'm getting the impression that this 
policy is going to change soonish.
We're currently considering
	http://www.w3.org/ns/foo
e.g.
	http://www.w3.org/ns/xbl

If the random years issue is the main concern, I suppose that should 
suffice.

The system administration cost of changing the domain name part 
(http://ns.w3.org/foo or http://w3.org/ns/foo or http://w3.org/foo ) 
seems high; changing that looks like more trouble than it's worth.

Issuing yearless URIs to replace existing namespace names also seems 
like more trouble than it's worth, to me, but who knows... the future 
is longer than the past, and if people are willing to do all the hard 
work to work out a transition plan and get it reviewed using normal W3C 
process (last call, CR, etc.), perhaps that's not a bad thing.


-- 
Dan Connolly, W3C http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/

Received on Wednesday, 19 July 2006 15:18:58 UTC