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

-----Original Message-----
From: David Carlisle <david@dcarlisle.demon.co.uk>
To: masinter@attlabs.att.com <masinter@attlabs.att.com>
Cc: xml-uri@w3.org <xml-uri@w3.org>
Date: Thursday, June 01, 2000 5:17 PM
Subject: 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.


Or, several years early. URIs have certian properties whether or not
you point this out in a spec which uses them.  And HTTP is a
certain existing protocol.

>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).


I don't think the 404 is going to break systems,as no one
(except Tim Brary's semi-serious suggestion) is forcing
the reader of a document to dereference the namespace name.

And I betthere aren't any namesapce documents out there which contain
midleading information of a machine-processable kind.
So I don't see cleaning this up as creating the disaster which you seem to
expect.

>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.

We are discussing how to fix them.  They are currently inconsistent
with XPath.

>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.


I don't belive that existing XML systems will break if we regard the URI
has identifying the namespace.

>> 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


uuuuh  Disagree.  Are we on the same wavelength?
There are a large number of XML languages for describing the syntactic
properties fo a namespace, which is all the XML level cares about anyway
at this level.
When you have a schema validator validating the schema for schemas,
it is hard to say that namespaces about namespaces are all in the future.

Tim

>David
>

Received on Friday, 2 June 2000 22:40:41 UTC