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

Tim Berners-Lee wrote:
> >Basically the absolute proposal comes from a fundamental
> >misunderstanding of the namespace rec:
> >That a namespace with name a particular URI _is_ the resource
> >identified by that URI.
>
>
> Yes.  You call it a fundamental misunderstanding -- but you
> will have to admit that it is a consisetnt understanding, that a
> lot of others have it, and that it is described in the URI specification.

I argue that the namespace REC talks about the "namespace name". That's it.
It doesn't say that the document that might be found at this location
actually *is* the namespace.

> You also have to admit that those who read that the namespace
> nsattr is a URI reference and who are familiar with URIs will
> naturally come to that conclusion.

So it is misleading, and lots of people have spent a lot of their time
clarifying this issues in the newsgroups.

> You seem not to be very familiar with the processing of URIs,
> but I would point out that for any application which is at all web-aware,
> a URI is a URI is a URI, and it is a great simplification to
> just quote the usual URI-reference way of giving one in a document.

Sure, but the namespace REC is about *naming* things. Nowhere it talks about
namespace names actually referring to something. Rather than overloading the
namespace name with a function for which it was not intended (at least when
solely depending on the letters of the recommendation), a new mechanism
could and should be defined which would have the property of defining a
reference to a resource. However, I think it also needs to discussed *what*
this thing should actually refer to (a DTD? a schema? documentation? a
metadocument pointing to other documents?).

> >The namespace name in
> >
> ><x xmlns="http://www.w3.org" />
> >
> >just is the URI of the W3C home page. That resource doesn't aquire any
> >properties of a namespace just because I used it's identifier as a
> >namespace name.
>
>
> That is NOT the case with URIs.  You can propose a totally new system
> of identifiers for namespace names if you like , or you can use URIs.
> With URIs, if two things are identified by the URIs and those URIs match
> character for character, then those things are the same.

According to that, the XML namespace *is* the current XML schema document
sitting at http://www.w3.org/XML/1998/namespace?

Received on Thursday, 8 June 2000 08:05:01 UTC