Re: Banning relative - No real damage?

At 09:29 AM 6/7/00 -0400, keshlam@us.ibm.com wrote:
>
>> the "absolutize" folks are willing to put up with "forbid".
>
>If so, the challenge reduces to one of dealing with the legacy documents
>already using relative syntax, which would become incorrect if forbid
>isaccepted. We had a few folks strongly asserting that they absolutely
>needed this, or at least needed some reasonable deprecation/migration path.
>I've lost track of whether that's still the case.

Because there is no mechanism at present for alerting processors to
different versions of the namespaces spec, I'd suggest that the W3C start
with deprecation, and only move on to full 'forbidden' status with another
revision of XML.

Basically, this will put out a warning (one I gave repeatedly at JavaOne
yesterday) that relative URI references are dangerous practice and suggests
that they will be excised from the spec, while letting current processors
carry on business as usual.  Once there's a mechanism to indicate "hey,
this document is a flavor that forbids relative URI references", then the
W3C can move forward on that.

Simon St.Laurent
XML Elements of Style / XML: A Primer, 2nd Ed.
Building XML Applications
Inside XML DTDs: Scientific and Technical
Cookies / Sharing Bandwidth
http://www.simonstl.com

Received on Wednesday, 7 June 2000 11:43:30 UTC