- From: Noah Mendelsohn <nrm@arcanedomain.com>
- Date: Wed, 10 Aug 2011 21:01:29 -0400
- To: "www-tag@w3.org" <www-tag@w3.org>, Norm Walsh <ndw@nwalsh.com>
- CC: Dan Connolly <dckc@madmode.com>, Ian Jacobs <ij@W3.org>
I have for some time had: ACTION-521: Figure out where we stand with http://www.w3.org/TR/2006/WD-namespaceState-20060329/ on the rec track The referent of that URI is the First Public Working Draft "The Disposition of Names in an XML Namespace" W3C Working Draft 29 March 2006 (yes, 2006). Feeling guilty, I'm now trying to sort out the history of ACTION-521. As best I can tell, what's gone on is: The TAG in January of 2006 published a Finding [1]. In March we published the first public working draft [2] with similar text, and that's what's mentioned in the action. So, that implies that we had agreed to put it on the Recommendation track, but I'm not immediately finding the record of the decision to do so. A few months later, in May 2006, we closed the related TAG issue namespaceState-48 [3], pointing in the email to the finding [1], and making no mention of plans for a Recommendation. It seems that in February of 2011, we reminded ourselves of the fact that we had for 5 years had a FPWD with no progress, and I took ACTION-521 to sort things out. This action assignment is somewhat confusingly buried [4] in a discussion that was focused mainly on Jonathan's work on metadata, and the scribe admits to being "somewhat uncertain what the topic is" just at that point. So, some ambiguity there. As to the technical scope of the work, note that this is an extremely short, essentially 1 page finding. Informally, the technical question discussed is whether namespaces are inherently open, in the sense that it is at least coherent to define new names in a namespace after initial deployment, or closed, in the sense that having a fixed set of defined names is inherent in being a namespace. The finding gives an existence proof of at least one namespace (the http://www.w3.org/XML/1998/namespace), which has been extended (the "id" local name was added.) The finding concludes that namespaces can be open or closed, and that: "Good Practice: Specifications that define namespaces SHOULD explicitly state their policy with respect to changes in the names defined in that namespace." So, that's the scope of the finding or Recommendation. The question now is, do we wish to take this forward as a Recommendation? I'm not aware of our having received any comments on the FPWD, but it's been a long time. If we do want to move forward, I need some TAG member to take responsibility for: 1. Looking for and responding to any old comments. 2. Researching the current state of play with respect to actual use of, extension of, and documentation of namespaces. 3. Presenting to the TAG an analysis of whether we should take essentially the existing text forward to CR, or perhaps directly to PR, or whether we should revise the text to produce a new working draft, or whether the effort should be abandoned after all. Norm: as editor of this, do you have any recommendations? I'm also cc:'ing Dan Connolly, on the chance that he'd remember something about this that I've forgotten. I'm also copying Ian so that he'll have every opportunity to chastise me for allowing our group to go years without updating this draft. For now, I'll bump the date on my action a couple of weeks to allow for discussion, and then schedule telcon or F2F discussion, where we can take the needed formal decision. Thank you. Noah [1] http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/doc/namespaceState-2006-01-09.html [2] http://www.w3.org/TR/2006/WD-namespaceState-20060329/ [3] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-tag/2006May/000 [4] http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/2011/02/09-minutes#item05
Received on Thursday, 11 August 2011 01:01:57 UTC