rel:foo for those who can't do without 'relative' URIs

• From: Jonathan Borden <jborden@mediaone.net>
• Date: Tue, 6 Jun 2000 22:03:49 -0400
• To: <xml-uri@w3.org>
• Message-ID: <005e01bfd024$9ef268f0$1b19da18@ne.mediaone.net>

The suggestion that relative URI refs 'point' to a family of URIs is an
excellent one.

For those times when you just can't do without a relative URI reference, may
I suggest the "rel" scheme be defined e.g.

xmlns:a="foo" --> xmlns:a="rel:foo"

when attempting to dereference the rel URI, the scheme is defined to prefix
the base URI, thus the rel: scheme provides the exact same semantics as the
relative URI reference yet is a legal absolute URI.

with this in place, is there *any* reason (besides the 3 legacy documents
:-) not to ban relative URI references as namespace names?

Jonathan Borden

Received on Tuesday, 6 June 2000 22:16:50 UTC