Re: Is a namesapce a resource? - was: duck

> ALL THREE OPTIONS ARE CONSISTENT.
I agree (but not everyone seems to agree that literal is consistent)

However the main motivation for "make absolute" appears to be the
view that the namespace _is_ the resource identified by the URI used
as the namespace name. This view appears inconsistent with the fact
that every URI is a valid namespace name.

> a weak form of Forbid -- namely the Deprecate/Undefined proposal

forbid is much much better than undefined.

If I had to rank the options on the table I would probably go
for (best first)

literal
fixed-base
forbid
undefined

the remaining proposal (absolute(ize)) doesn't get a ranking because
it is just so bad. Similarly unranked is any proposal that changes the
meaning of (the vast majority of) documents that have absolute URI as
namespace names.

> I think I've decided that using an offset as a name is Just Plain
> Dumb
I think using URIs at all as names was probably not that good an idea
given that they are not supposed to be dereferenced, but if standards
got changed just because they had some eccentric features then there
would be no standards at all.

Saying that some other option is consistent and/or better than the
current literal definition is fairly easy. But that in itself isn't
sufficient reason to change.

If it hadn't been for xpath there would have been no justification to
change at all.

David

Received on Thursday, 8 June 2000 18:17:25 UTC