Re: XBL Namespace uses the data: scheme

On Fri, 30 Jun 2006 12:59:55 +0200, Robin Berjon <robin.berjon@expway.fr>  
wrote:

> On Jun 30, 2006, at 10:56, Charles McCathieNevile wrote:


> 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:

[good example given]

>> 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.

There are a lot of better temporary namespaces one could use...

>> - 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.

it is also a source of confusion. While it is possible for people to  
remember things up to some point (long past 7±2 in this sort of case)  
there is a point at which most people should give up and go with some kind  
of tool. I manage to keep in my head the two RDF namespaces that I use  
which end with slash not hash, but even there it is simpler to have a tool  
that does it.

I understand the pain, but I am not convinced that removing the random  
number would solve the problem. In my own case I have come across multiple  
instances of a meaningful mnemonic name turning out to be a bad choice,  
and the one thing worse than forgettting the namespace is having it  
change, since that really requires a constantly updating tool to collect  
the new namespaces in use. (Sloppy namespace handling will also get you  
there by having slahed and slashless namespaces used in the wild :( ). The  
namespaces I have been happiest with over 5+ years of usage have all been  
ones that seem pretty silly - their stability becomes much more important  
than the name, whereas many of the strings that are meant to help have  
turned out not to be so useful over time. (This is not just W3C  
namespaces, but various others I have minted or used).

cheers

Chaals

-- 
   Charles McCathieNevile, Opera Software: Standards Group
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Received on Friday, 30 June 2006 11:14:08 UTC