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

> There are two approaches to this that we have seen:
> (1) force a constant name for each namespace, and require that the
>     namespace be invoked using that exact name.
> 
>     This mandates that www.W3.org/X and www.w3.org/X and www.w3.org/X/
>     are all different, and probably that only one of them is correct
>     for a given namespace.

I believe this is correct. Part of 'giving' a namespace (so that it is
a given namespace, of course) is giving the namespace name.
(Of course, your examples are all wrong! Since they're missing
the "http://" at the beginning!)


> (2) if an XMP processor or other names-space-aware application encounters
>     a namespace it does not recognise exactly, require that it either
>     [2a] stop processing and signal an error, or
>     [2b] dereference the namespace and interpret what it finds.

> It may seem like there is an option [2c], in which a processor ignores
> namespacess it doesn't recognise, and also [2d], HTML Mode, in which
> a processor uses case-insensitve compariton, soundex, and other
> heuristics, in order to intuit the possible error.  Neither of these
> are options in an XML environment where so-called Draconian error
> handling is the norm.  It's illegal to process a non-well-formed
> document and label it as XML.

I think that [2a] is the correct behavior; in some strange way, you can
think of [2b] as a way of increasing the number of cases where
the XMP processor or namespace-aware application 'recognises exactly'
the namespace; otherwise, we haven't defined what it means to 'interpret
what it finds', unless what it finds upon 'dereference' is something
that *does* allow it to recognize the namespace name exactly.

> What should be at the other end of the URI is a separate question.

Not really.

Received on Saturday, 3 June 2000 05:16:23 UTC