Request for status dump and issues check

I've been incommunicado for a week. Catching up on this is going to be
timeconsuming. If there's been a large shift in positions/rationalles, I
would _GREATLY_ appreciate it if someone could post a summary of the
current state of the world, similar to my atttempt to summarize where we
were before I left.


At that time, I think I was just starting to understand the argument that
"the Namespace Name is a URI, the Namespace Declaration is a Reference to
that URI, therefore we should absolutize"... but had some serious concerns
about whether URIs really met the needs of namespace-aware document
processing.

* One of those concerns was that there didn't seem to be a strong "is not
equal" test for URIs, which Namespaces require.

* The reason namespaces switched to references in the first place was to
support fragment-identifier suffixes.  However, URIs per se don't support
these... so if we're talking about the URI being the "real" identity of the
Namespace, what happens to that #whatever suffix? (I'm not sure anyone is
actually using them... but that's what we thought about relative
references. The Namespace spec, as written, permitted them.)

* Others had pointed out that some URIs, such as mailto:fred,  are
"relative" even though they don't use relative syntax. But the "if it hurts
when you do that, stop doing that" argument seems valid for that case; if
you want a reference to a specific namespace rather than a family of
namespaces, you shouldn't use relative syntax and you shouldn't use these.

* On a purely  "make it affordable" basis, I was concerned that
absolutizing meant spending cycles on every namespace in order to make the
fringe cases -- the relative references -- work "properly". Even though my
employer sellls hardware, I'd prefer to keep costs of processing XML down
whenever that can reasonably be done. (I'm a software engineer, not a
computer scientist; I'm trained to sensitive to computational overhead even
when it it's a small constant multiplier rather than N-to-some-power.)

______________________________________
Joe Kesselman  / IBM Research

Received on Monday, 5 June 2000 14:17:14 UTC