Namespace dispatch

On Fri, May 09, 2003 at 05:21:21PM -0700, Mark Nottingham wrote:
> I think the next step is to put together an Internet-Draft (since it's
> HTTP-related, the IETF is the most appropriate venue), and begin
> discussion at both the W3C (TAG?) and in the IETF (http-wg list,
> probably).

I started writing one a while ago, but never finished, partly because I
bit off more than I could chew; I tried to solve the more general
problem of compound XML namespace dispatch.

See;

http://216.239.33.104/search?q=cache:27dKdZgJ33IC:www.markbaker.ca/2002/01/draft-baker-generic-xmlns-dispatch-00.txt+baker+namespace+dispatch&hl=en&ie=UTF-8

(my machine's dead, so that's the Google cache)

> Another issue is that which Don brings up; how to identify a specific
> format. My inclination is to only use a URI, as URIs are first-class
> identifiers on the Web, and anything worth identifying should have a URI.
> That having been said, there's no regular way to turn a QName into a URI
> [1], which I think is what Don wants to do. So, in the meantime, we could
> do something like
>  XML-Dialect: "http://example.com/foo.xsd"; localname="Bar"
> making the localname parameter optional, so that we can drop it once the
> QName mapping issue is solved to everyone's satisfaction.

I've heard this raised before, but I don't see it as a problem.  It's
been best practice since SGML days for all vocabularies to have a
generic root container element.  Consider XHTML and the frameset
sub-vocabulary; it's still contained with an <html> element.  This makes
it possible to unambiguosly associate a namespace URI with a vocabulary.
Even in Don's SOAP Envelope example, SOAP only has one possible root
element, making it unnecessary to account for it in the identifier; the
namespace URI suffices.

MB
-- 
Mark Baker.   Ottawa, Ontario, CANADA.        http://www.markbaker.ca
Web architecture consulting, technical reports, evaluation & analysis
  Actively seeking contract work or employment

Received on Sunday, 11 May 2003 07:37:16 UTC