Re: Banning relative - No real damage?

--- Tim Berners-Lee <timbl@w3.org> wrote:
> The proposal is on the table that there would be no real
> damage if relative URI-references were deprocated 
> 
 
> However, the practicaility of it that not one single instance of
> a document has been brought as evidence that this is a real
> problem.  Everyone pointed at Microsoft, and Microsoft produced an
> example
> http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/xml-uri/2000May/0145.html
> which does *not* in fact use relative URIs.

I use them relative (in fact, non-existent) namespaces all the time as
a processing hack in XSL transforms using IE5. 

<HTML xmlns:hack="file://localhost/firetruck.txt"> ... </HTML>

Then I can wrap the elements <hack:this>, <hack:that> up inside HTML
tags yet process them independently of <HTML:P>
and so on and so forth. Heck, it displays OK in the browser! Since this
is exactly the kind of crude uniquification that the 1.0 spec was meant
to enable, I'm really astounded that hoards of users haven't come
forward with examples. Maybe they're just embarassed -- or too busy
trying to figure out MS's documentation ;-)

So this proposal may not be breaking any archival documents (I'm not
crazy enough to archive anything using namespaces) but it would break
several thousand transforms.

S.

P.S. Writing that "Microsoft produced an example" in response to a
request for a "single instance" is not really fair -- What Micheal Rys
wrote was that "All the relative URIs that our tools generate (AFAIK)
are intradocument URIs". Surely more than one document?


=====
<? "To imagine a language is to imagine a form of life."
    -- Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations ?>

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Received on Monday, 5 June 2000 23:24:13 UTC