namespaces vs. language versions

I think I still had an action item on the HTML working group to insure
that the versioning document touched on the relationship of namespaces
to language versions.

It is pretty clear to me given the fairly broad definition of "version"
as it applies to language-as-used, language-as-specified that multiple
'versions' of an XML-based language might share the same namespace,
and that therefore the "namespace" alone could not serve as the
sole indicator of version. On the other hand, two languages which
use different namespaces are different languages, clearly.

I'm not sure if there is general advice about when new namespaces
SHOULD be used when defining a new language version/variant,
except to point out that changing namespaces can have bad
backward compatibility issues.

Larry
--
http://larry.masinter.net