Re: Request for status dump and issues check

-----Original Message-----
From: Simon St.Laurent <simonstl@simonstl.com>
To: xml-uri@w3.org <xml-uri@w3.org>
Date: Monday, June 05, 2000 3:58 PM
Subject: Re: Request for status dump and issues check


>I don't think anything significant has changed in anyone's position (so far
>as I can tell).
> On the other hand, I think it's at least clearer that the
>underlying assumptions on which people are building their arguments are
>wildly (perhaps wickedly) different.


Actually, I think there have been shifts.    I can say (and have indeed
said)
that I now understand better now what people were saying before
(e.g. when some said they used relative URI-references I assumed
they were using them in that sense rather than as just strings,
which caused a lot of my initial confusion.)  I think others have too.

I have also shifted ground in that rather than simply insisting on
absolutizing, I can see we may have to compromise with
banning relative URIs, because the interpretations of them
are simply inconsistent.

I see two possible outcomes at the moment which I understand

1)  Namespace references are  URI-references according to the spec.
   XML document processing requires a base-URI to be provided, or it may
under some
  circumstances fail, but XML processors should provide a base URI of some
sort
  in all cases (even based on pwd in a unix pipe)

  The bit in the Namespace Recommendation about character-for-character
comparisons
  was wrong because no one had then spotted that it provided inconsistencies
with
  relative URUI references.  It is changed to be compatible to the later
Xpath spec.
  Users note that there are rather specific cases unlikely in real use in
which this
  could conceivably cause well-formedness for documents with multiple
namespaces
  all quoted using relative URI-references to change.

  This would be my personal preference as I believe getting it right is more
important
  for the long term.

2) Namespace references are URI-references but the use of relative-URIs is
  not allowed in a conforming document.  The results of using one are
undefined

  The namespace specification was found after its release as a
Recommendation
  to be inconsistent in the case of relative URI-references for namespace
names.

  The restriction to disallow relative URI-references was made to allow XML
  software to check well-formedness of a document without access to its URI.

  This would be a compromise I could live with. Especially if, as David
Durand
  suggested, it be the short-term course of action and (1) be lined up for
XML 2.0

As John Curran just said there have been many wild ideas which have
lead to useful discussion but do not remain in the universe of discourse.

There is I think one option which I can try to summarize.

3) Namespace names look like (have the syntax of) URI references but are
not.
  They do not share any semantics with the URI references which they happen
 to match. Within any context in which a URI is expected that URI cannot be
 treated as a namespace name

I could not live with that.

Received on Wednesday, 7 June 2000 22:56:40 UTC