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

Quoth David G. Durand:
>This misrepresents the history significantly. There was a typo that
>allowed relative URI references, in an attempt to allow only for the
>presence of fragment identifiers. The fact that URIs, as used for
>namespaces, were not required to have any dereferencing semantics was
>a clear and consistent goal of the group working on the standard, and
>of Microsoft in proposing it (at least from an early date). The fact
>that you have consistently disagreed with this notion is _not_
>justification for calling it a "typo".

He's got a point. It's an inconsistancy, and hence a design mistake. But if
there's a _typo_ -- a purely editing mistake -- it was either in not
realizing that URI References allowed relative syntax, or not explicitly
saying that the name used the syntax of URI References without any
implication about semantics, since we've been told repeatedly that Literal
was the intent of the Namespace spec's authors.


>We've now made this formerly internal debate public. I don't see that
>there's enough agreement to warrant overturning the decision already
>made once, but that's just my take on it.

I think there's been some progress in actually understanding the
rationalles behind each proposal. I'm not sure whether the fact that the
debate was public actually helped that process.


There's some evidence that we may finally be moving toward agreement on an
solution, with TimBL's proposal (2) (which I'm calling the
Deprecate/Undefined approach).

Received on Thursday, 8 June 2000 11:53:47 UTC