Re: Banning relative - No real damage?

>What Microsoft claims, and has claimed, is that their *tools*
>generate such documents.  The actual documents are in the hands of their
>customers, who are probably not listening.

Yep.

The question then becomes: How many of these tool-generated documents are
_transient_? If it's the majority, one can argue that migrating the tool to
generate absolute namespace names and use something like xmlns-binding: for
the relative reference to the XSD Schema (which seemed to be their
concern), might be possible without much adverse effect on the users. Add
support for the new indirection, start generating new documents, then some
time later phase out support for the old documents.

If the tool-generated documents are persistant, one can still easily write
a tool to convert them to the new convention... but the problem is finding
all those documents. If I were attempting to do this, I'd suggest writing
the conversion into the tools themselves... "A relative namespace name has
been encountered. This usage was permitted by the original Namespace spec,
but has been deprecated by the W3C. Do you want to reorganize the document
into the new recommended form or abort processing?"


Are there still any Microsoft folks involved in the discussion? If so, what
say you -- is this a plausable approach to serving your customers?

Received on Wednesday, 7 June 2000 10:55:45 UTC