General concerns (was Re: Request for status dump...)

At 10:58 PM 6/7/00 -0400, Tim Berners-Lee wrote:
>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'm sitting in San Francisco airport, digesting the last few messages and a
lot of conversations from JavaOne.

I'm very concerned that a lot of the conversations about namespace best
practices seems to have gone entirely under the radar of some key
constituencies at the W3C, and have for well over a year.  

The disconnect has been rather painfully obvious throughout this
discussion, and only about the last week has seen a real awareness of the
gap.  (I see no move by certain key W3C players to move toward the
understanding held by the broader XML community, but acknowledging its
existence is a sizable step forward.)

While I realize that the W3C is a busy place, and that its staff hopefully
has better things to do than analyze every message on xml-dev and
comp.text.xml, I hope that in the future we can avoid philosphical train
wrecks like the current mess.

Banning relative URIs, should that prove possible, is an expedient, but
seems to merely repaper over fundamental disagreement.  

Something has to be done to move things forward, however, as namespaces
were cited regularly at JavaOne as a serious cause for concern with the
W3C's activities.  (Some of that dates back to earlier controversies, but I
was astonished by the number of people aware of this latest round and its
impact on XML moving forward.)

I didn't expect this discussion would last this long or prove this
unfruitful, but the larger world outside this list seems surprisingly aware
of the existence of real problems.

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 Thursday, 8 June 2000 01:12:09 UTC