Re: Moving on (was Re: URIs quack like a duck)

On Thu, Jun 01, 2000 at 10:59:12AM -0400, Paul W. Abrahams wrote:
>Michael Mealling wrote:
>>On Thu, Jun 01, 2000 at 10:25:36AM -0400, Paul W. Abrahams wrote:
>>>Michael Mealling wrote:
>>>
>>>>I'm becoming more comfortable with creating a new attribute that
>>>>does identify the namespace in the URI sense of identification.
>>>
>>>Glad to hear that.   One of the most compelling arguments for a
>>>new attribute is that it relieves the pressure on the xmlns attribute
>>>to be all things to all people.
>>
>>Help me clarify some things:
>>
>>The viewpoint of 'namespace as differentiator only' is that it
>>only has to be unique within what scope? The document, the application
>>or the universe?
>
>The answer seems obvious, but that's probably because I misunderstood your
>question.  The namespace name is a character string, nothing more.  It 
>just happens to have the form of a URI, but in principle (though not 
>according to the namespace spec, of course) it could be any string that 
>we'd expect to be unique (i.e., no one >else would choose it by accident) 
>within the set of all possible character strings.   If we have another 
>attribute for namespace identification in the URI sense, then there's 
>no reason to demand anything more than literal, uninterpreted,
>textual identification from the xmlns attribute.

So relative URIs, being non-unique, should be deprecated?

>So I suppose the direct answer to your question is that the scope is the 
>universe of character strings, but that's probably not what you're looking for.

No, that's fine. I was hoping someone would say its the document but
I kind of figured that wasn't the case...

-MM

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Received on Thursday, 1 June 2000 11:17:33 UTC