Re: The 'resource' identified by a namespace name URI should be the namespace

> I think that you get into trouble allowing arbitrary URIs as namespace
> names,

that isn't a very specific argument.

>  and that the world would work better if it was stated that the
> 'resource' identified by the namespace name is 'the definition of
> the namespace'. 

You are two years too late to do that.

There are (thousands? millions?  who knows) documents that use
namespaces that use (typically, http) URI that either refer to some
existing resource that isn't the namespace or refer to some potential
resource that the creator of the namespace could locate at the URI,
but hasn't (ie which give a 404 error to any system that mistakenly
tries to dereference a namespace URI without some extra knowledge that
something useful is there).

Namespaces work and work well and are one of W3C's more popular and
widely used recommendations in the XML area. Don't break them now
just because you think that an alternative would have been better.
It is always the case that, with hindsight, some aspects of a spec
could have been done differently but that is not enough reason to
change the spec in incompatible ways.

> Since we currently have no technical means to define a namespace other
> than to identify it, there is no expectation that a namespace name
> be a URI that is dereferencable.

agreed

David

Received on Thursday, 1 June 2000 17:12:26 UTC