Re: Mechanism, not policy [was: Attribute uniqueness...]

David Carlisle wrote:
> 
>    > If we accept that premise, then the assertion that a URI Reference really
>    > ought to be a reference to a family of URIs (with the specific one selected
>    > at the time that the reference is examined, in context) makes a bit more
>    > sense. It explains the fact that ..\light lights a bulb in one case and a
>    > fuse in another as being an _intentional_ result of the decision to use a
>    > context-dependent reference in the first place. The answer "if it hurts
>    > when you do that, don't do that" really is consistant with this model.
>    >
>    > Of course, making sense, being desirable, and being wise may be three very
>    > different things.
> 
>    Quite. To say "using a relative URI reference is almost always stupid
>    and risky, so don't do that" is a fine policy for practitioners
>    to adopt, if they so choose.
> 
>    To go further and say "... so let's prohibit it from the syntax"
>    is to gum up the mechanism with exceptions based on policy.
> 
> You appear to be agreeing (as I do) with Joe Kesselman's quoted
> statement that the literal interpretation is workable

Huh? Joe's statement isn't the literal interpretation; it's
the absolutize interpretation, no?

> and gives the
> expected behaviour on relative URI. If we do all agree on that
> then it is true that there is no need to consider the forbid option,
> and all that needs doing is fixing xpath spec to match xpath
> implementations and the namespace spec. But somehow I suspect life
> won't be so simple.
> 
> If the namespace name is being used for namespace processing then
> basically neither you nor the processor ever needs to be aware
> whether or not the name is a relative URI (what's the point of
> checking for a : if you are going to do the same thing with the string
> whatever is there?) So I don't see any "risk" in that (except for
> people who misread the namespace spec and mistakenly expect to
> be able to locate anything at the namespace name URI).
> 
> If some process does decide to dereference the namespace name
> the expected behaviour, given a relative URI, must be that what you get
> depends on the current base. But any such dereferencing happens
> after any namespace processing and should not be an issue for the
> namespace spec.
> 
> David

-- 
Dan Connolly, W3C http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/
tel:+1-913-491-0501 (office phone as of 27 Apr 2000)
mailto:connolly.pager@w3.org?subject=pls%20call%20+1-NNN-NNN-NNNN

Received on Wednesday, 7 June 2000 14:41:29 UTC