RE: Schematron schema for SOAP 1.1 Envelopes

On Thursday, September 21, Rick Jeliffe wrote

"... Henrik is trying to rewrite history: the statement in the spec that is
it "not a goal that" the URI reference "be directly usable for retrieval of
a schema" clearly states that it is not the model or expectation in XML
Namespaces that applications will do a GET on the namespace URI to fetch a
schema. ... There are many reasons why this should be so.  The proponents of
namespaces=schema have never tried to answer the reasons. Instead we get
this treat-namespaces-as-lucky-dip-then-everything-will-be-fine guff. "

Two points deserve to be made:

(1) 

Name calling and conspiracy theories are not appropriate in rational
discussion and do not advance technical consideration of the issues. 

(2) 

What the specification says is "It is not a goal that it [a namespace name]
be directly usable for retrieval of a schema (if any exists)." 

That is, the specification says that SOME namespace names are not usable
directly for resource retrieval.  It does not say that ALL namespace names
are not usable directly for resource retrieval. 

That is what the literal wording indicates. 

Regarding the intentions of the designers of the namespaces specification in
this respect, I was one of the editors of the namespaces specification and I
recall the discussions reasonably clearly.  There were many people who
wanted the specification to say different things on this matter, but the
final consensus was that the specification would confine itself to syntactic
machinery and not make any statement requiring or forbidding any
relationship between the namespace name and any retrievable resources.

Reasonable people have continued to debate their preferences for what they
believe the specification should have said.  This is useful, but
interoperability is not helped by deconstructist readings of the existing
specification. Interoperability and rational discussion need to be based on
a clear understanding of what the specification actually says and then
building on it or changing the specification if necessary.

Received on Thursday, 21 September 2000 15:16:22 UTC