Re: Request for status dump and issues check

keshlam@us.ibm.com wrote:

> 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.

Some people understand other people's positions better.  Some people don't.
The few new ideas that have been brought up have generally died on the vine.

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

After absolutizing, you simply have to chop off further processing and say
"if not equal now, then not equal at all", neglecting things like DNS
case-blindness, symbolic links, http: and ftp: aliases, and so on.

> * 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.)

No problem.  The absolutizing algorithm (RFC 2396 resolution) starts with
a base URI and a URI reference and generates an absolute URI *and* a
fragment identifier.
 
> * 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.)

IMHO the cycles you spend on this are completely dwarfed by the cycles
you spend on general-purpose XML parsing anyway.

As is said in _Software Elements of Style_:  A program that uses matrixes
smaller than 10 x 10 can afford to neglect the time it takes to initialize
them.  If the matrixes are larger than 10 x 10, it can also afford to
neglect initialization time --- because computation time will swamp it.

-- 

Schlingt dreifach einen Kreis um dies! || John Cowan <jcowan@reutershealth.com>
Schliesst euer Aug vor heiliger Schau,  || http://www.reutershealth.com
Denn er genoss vom Honig-Tau,           || http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
Und trank die Milch vom Paradies.            -- Coleridge (tr. Politzer)

Received on Monday, 5 June 2000 15:20:22 UTC