Re: Is a namesapce a resource? - was: duck

> Maybe it is that he concpet of self-describing documents just does not
> exist for many people.  While I can understand that not everyone would
> put there energy I had not anticipated that there would be an actual
> resistance to identifying namespcaes as resources.

If by self describing you mean using the namespace name to locate
information directly at the specified URI, rather than using it as a
string in a key lookup in a catalogue to find processing code or
stylesheets etc then yes there will be great resistence to that
as the spec explicitly says that dereferencing the namespace uri
is not a goal of namespaces, so for most existing namespaces
you get nothing, or something unrelated to the namespace if you
dereference the namespace name.

The few examples that do have something at the namespace URI are
really just educational and friendly error messages.

Basically an HTML file at the namespace URI is just to help beginners
and should say something like

  This is a namespace URI, you shouldn't have tried downloading anything
  from this URL, perhaps you were looking for the spec, or the dtd or
  the schema.

Giving appropriate links.

Namespace URI point at anything at all or more often than not, they
point at nothing.

They are not self describing documents, they are self identifying.

If you pass some elements in the MathML namespace to a browser,
if it knows that namespace then fine, it knows it has some MathML
but of it doesn't know it, then it has to just raise an error or
ignore the elements. there is no implication that it can use the
namespace name to _discover_ anything that it does not know.

David

Received on Tuesday, 6 June 2000 12:56:02 UTC