Re: rel:foo for those who can't do without 'relative' URIs

-----Original Message-----
From: Jonathan Borden <jborden@mediaone.net>
To: xml-uri@w3.org <xml-uri@w3.org>
Date: Tuesday, June 06, 2000 10:17 PM
Subject: rel:foo for those who can't do without 'relative' URIs


>The suggestion that relative URI refs 'point' to a family of URIs is an
>excellent one.
>
>For those times when you just can't do without a relative URI reference,
may
>I suggest the "rel" scheme be defined e.g.
>
>xmlns:a="foo" --> xmlns:a="rel:foo"
>
>when attempting to dereference the rel URI, the scheme is defined to prefix
>the base URI, thus the rel: scheme provides the exact same semantics as the
>relative URI reference yet is a legal absolute URI.


No, sorry, you can't do that.  A URI cannot be document-relative.
(True there are some schemes like file: which only work within one machine
but the intent is clear that the space is provided in order to include
filenames
which have that property, on systems which will only encompass one machine).

People are doing string comparison of URIs all over the place.
You would be moving the problem we have with relative URI referencess into
the Absolute URI domain!

>with this in place, is there *any* reason (besides the 3 legacy documents
>:-) not to ban relative URI references as namespace names?


That may still be the consensus.

>Jonathan Borden
>

Received on Wednesday, 7 June 2000 23:47:23 UTC