Re: fundamental difference?

-----Original Message-----
From: Simon St.Laurent <simonstl@simonstl.com>
To: xml-uri@w3.org <xml-uri@w3.org>
Date: Friday, June 02, 2000 10:58 PM
Subject: fundamental difference?


>At 10:42 PM 6/2/00 -0400, Tim Berners-Lee wrote:
>>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.
>
>I do not think that word means what you think it means.  ('namespace')
>
>It doesn't mean that I'm right and you're wrong, but I think you have a
>fundamentally different perspective of what a namespace is than a lot of
>people on this list.


That may be so.   However, as without that perspective there can be nothing
built
on XML,  for me it is important.

>To me, a namespace is a convention, a convenience for providing uniquely
>identifiable names.  There is no substance to a namespace, only a handy
>signifier composed of characters in a namespace URI that can be attached to
>other signifiers like element and attribute names.
>
>To you, a namespace seems to be something concrete (as abstractions go),
>something which has properties, meaning, all that other signified stuff.


Yes, I have to tell you, that when I get an invoice in XML and the namespace
tells me its a invoice then I am interpreting namespace as meaning langauge.
And folks, so are you.   The XHTML namespace has a big speci defining
it whaich says more than the list of tags in it.  It is the work of hundreds
of people and it is the basis for intreroperability betwen clients and
servers everywhere.
Ecommerce will all happen with documnets written in languages.
The fact that the namesapce defines what those documents mean is that -0 a
fact.
That's how everyone I have come across actually is talking about working.
They aren't alking about exchanging meaningless documents, or having the
meaning ofth terms conveyed by an out of band telephone call. No sir,
they are using the namespace name to mean that this document is scalable
vector
graphics. On this basis they drasw it rather than pay it.  William Perry
points out they have the option
of draing a bill orpaying a picture as an independent agent, but still the
invoise has
a meaning and that meaning for an XML+NS document rests on the namespace.


>At this point, your concrete namespaces seem awfully menacing to my
>perception of namespaces.  It's not just that your namespaces have
>substance, but that you somehow see that substance as having some kind of
>moral force, without which namespaces are useless.


Well, documents have moral force, and without a namespace ID they are
just strings of bits.

>The Namespaces in XML spec still reads to me as a description of a
>convention, not a definition of what a namespace is.  If you want to make
>judgments based on this conception of a namespace having substance, I
>strongly suggest that you run this conception through the full W3C process
>rather than positing it as an axiom and making it the foundation of your
>plans.


Too late.  People are already sending XML across the net with meaning.
maybe we could stop them. maybe we could revoke any meaning associated with
it.
Maybe we could strip the xHTML spec down to the bare syntactic constraints
or better just a lits of tag names.

>The disagreement is acceptable, but the consequences seem to infer an
>endless circle that will spin unless properly put to rest.  If the full
>process merely spins, at least some formal (and hopefully public) effort
>was given to the task, and we can move on with a better understanding of
>the disagreement, working around it as necessary.


The problems is taht at some level the philosophy is orally assumed, for any
spec.
Obviously I assumed too much was shared.  Do you have an alternative basis
for atributig meaning to an XML document, or are you happy for there to be
none?

>Right now, we seem just plain stuck.


And I have 17 messages unread at 1am... how stuck can you get? :-/

>Simon St.Laurent
>XML Elements of Style / XML: A Primer, 2nd Ed.
>Building XML Applications
>Inside XML DTDs: Scientific and Technical
>Cookies / Sharing Bandwidth
>http://www.simonstl.com
>

Received on Saturday, 3 June 2000 01:03:01 UTC