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

> Yes, it does. That is: to use http://www.w3.org/ as a namespace name
> is to claim that it refers to a namespace.

Not at all. I just did it, and I didn't have to claim anything and the
document was a conforming document according to the namespace rec.

Every string that matches the syntax of a URI reference is a namespace
name. But not all (if any) resources identified by such are namespaces.

Take any URI you like, and give 

<x xmlns=". ... that uri ...." />

to a sax2 parser, or xslt system or any other namespace aware system
of your choice. the document will be accepted and the namespace name
will be that uri. this is just a fact, you can't argue that because
the namespace has a property called "name" that somehow it has to
_be_ the same as some resource that has an identifier with the same
string.


me> That a namespace with name a particular URI _is_ the resource
me> identified by that URI.

> That's a tautology, no? By analogy:

No. You always know whether a a string is being used as a namespace
name or as a resource identifier, so the fact that these two disjoint
concepts happen to use the same set of strings is no problem.

You may _wish_ the namespace to be the resource identified by the
namespace name considered as a URI, but in general (and probably
always) that is not the case. I see no way that the namespace
mechanism could possibly be altered to make it the case.

David

Received on Wednesday, 7 June 2000 17:46:04 UTC