- From: Robin Berjon <robin.berjon@expway.fr>
- Date: Fri, 30 Jun 2006 12:59:55 +0200
- To: Charles McCathieNevile <chaals@opera.com>
- Cc: www-tag@w3.org
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. > "I have received complaints" is a statement that applies to almost > any situation or permutation Again, agreed on the form, but in this case there are many of us who have heard many times the very same complaint. It's bad enough that people looking for information on the W3C have to deal with randomised URIs for resources clearly intended for human use (humans certainly do use them), with namespaces they have to learn the same by heart. Take a typical document I was working on earlier this week. I invite whoever believes that the current policy is good to time themselves linking the year to the tech for the namespaces that document is using: 1999 xml 2002 xlink 2000 xhtml 1999 xforms 1998 svg 2001 rdf 1999 xml-events I wouldn't even consider that document to be making heavy use of namespaces, there certainly are quite a few others from W3C that could be added to that list (in fact, the actual document contains a few more but they all follow a "Web of Humans" type of convention and so are unproblematic). > The current data: URI is ludicrously non-mnemonic, and choosing a > more useful one could be achieved even with the constraint of > having to include two years and a colour name. Right, I'm not super fond of the data: thingie but it's meant to be temporary. > 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. > - the difficulty I find in hand-writing namespaces is in fact > remembering whether the thing ends with a slash or not Yeah that's a pain, albeit I find a much lesser one, notably given that there are far fewer options to explore when things don't work. -- Robin Berjon Senior Research Scientist Expway, http://expway.com/
Received on Friday, 30 June 2006 11:00:06 UTC