Re: W3C URN scheme 'root' doesn't exist?

David Singer writes:

> On Jun 23, 2014, at 10:06 , Henry S. Thompson <ht@inf.ed.ac.uk> wrote:
>
>> David Singer writes:
>> 
>>> Since we want permanent labels, I fear that tying them to a version
>>> of the spec and its anchors and/or sections, and location, might be
>>> fragile.  And, as Robin points out, we don¢t need choice.
>> 
>> The whole point of W3C's usage of undated URIs is so that the location
>> _doesn't_ change.  As long as there is a W3C,
>> http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/#attr-trace-kind-subtitles will resolve.
>> That's as good a promise as you're going to get (persistence as
>> commonly understood is a service-level guarantee, _not_ a property of
>> names!).
>
> and when HTML5 moves to HTML6 or 7?  Is the name really specific to this version of HTML?
>
> what if some editor decides to change the name of the anchor (consistently in the document), so now it¢s
>
> http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/#attribute-trace-kind-subtitles
>
> is there really a guarantee of stability for anchor names?

Either DASH want a guarantee of reference to what was meant on the day
HTML5 does to REC, in which case they _do_ use a dated reference, or
they want it to update as that spec evolves, in which case they use
the undated one and depend on a commitment of preservation for the
anchor from the HTML WG.  If DASH doesn't want to depend on such a
commitment, then they should go back to the namespace URI proposal,
with a namespace document at http://www.w3.org/ns/html-track-kind with
appropriate anchors in it, which _is_ under the control of DASH and
can refer to whatever HTMLn document they choose to, updating as and
when they choose to.

I.e the 'http://www.w3.org/ns' namespace has the ability to deliver
not only a _binding_ of various names, accompanied by an explicit
policy regarding their mutabilty (see The Disposition of Names in an
XML Namespace [1]), all of which is under the control of DASH, but
also a _resolution_ mechanism for those names which DASH can adapt as
necessary to accommodate to changes outside their control.

ht

[1] http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/doc/namespaceState.html
-- 
       Henry S. Thompson, School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh
      10 Crichton Street, Edinburgh EH8 9AB, SCOTLAND -- (44) 131 650-4440
                Fax: (44) 131 650-4587, e-mail: ht@inf.ed.ac.uk
                       URL: http://www.ltg.ed.ac.uk/~ht/
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Received on Monday, 23 June 2014 17:33:28 UTC