Re: moving toward a decision

At 07:48 PM 7/3/00 -0600, C. M. Sperberg-McQueen wrote:

>Q3: But I thought that ../foo and http://example.com/foo
>     meant the same thing in the context of the base URI
>     http://example.com/pathSeg/thisDoc.xml
>
>A3: Even though per RFC 2396 the relative URI reference "../foo"
>     denotes "http://example.com/f" in the context of the base URI
>     "http://example.com/pathSeg/nsDoc.xml", the namespace
>     recommendation associates the prefix 'a' with '../foo', the
>     un-expanded URI reference that occurs in the namespace
>     declaration.
>
>
>Q4: OK, then, what's the namespace name of the root element in
>     thatDoc?
>
>A4: ../foo , per the namespaces spec as written.
>
>     But be careful with terminology.  The 'namespace name' is
>     '../foo', but the Namespaces Rec doesn't define a term 'Namespace
>     URI'.  According to section 4, URI References, in RFC 2396, "the
>     URI" denoted by "../foo" is http://example.org/foo -- and terms
>     like "namespace URI", which allude to that mechanism, should be
>     used with great caution.

It seems, then, that a deprecated "namespace name" form is local to the 
document in which it appears.

To provide interpretation in a wider context, one _might_ invoke RFC 2396 
rules to determine the corresponding "namespace URI" (but this is left 
out-of-scope).

Then:

- Deprecation of relative URI forms might be taken to suggest that 
satisfaction of the goal of "universal names, whose scope extends beyond 
their containing document" [from NS rec, section 1] is not specified for 
such forms.

- similarly, satisfaction of the goal of "uniqueness and persistence" [from 
NS rec, section 2] is not specified for relative URI forms.

- the definition of "identical" [from NS rec, section 1] is not applied to 
relative URI forms (or applies only within the context of a single 
containing document).

This works for me.

#g


------------
Graham Klyne
(GK@ACM.ORG)

Received on Tuesday, 4 July 2000 08:42:07 UTC