Re: Is a namespace [always] a [shared] resource?

On Fri, 9 Jun 2000, Al Gilman wrote:
> >Finally, as the past month's debate has proven, using relative names does
> >not communicate well with humans attempting to read your document; there
> >are too darned many possible ways of interpreting this.
> 
> Hardly.  _Instances_ of relative references relate well to real people; The
> _class_ of relative references is harder to relate to in the abstract (as
> we have done here) because there is the _added dimension_ of the context
> within which the relative reference is posed.   But short, relative
> references are far more mnemonic than unnecessarily global identifiers.
> Hands down.

IMHO, there is a big difference between relative URIs for entity 
resources (your typical HTML example) and for namespaces.  For
entity resources, the browser or a verification tool can check 
to see if the entity exists; if not, then the relative URI can
easily be flagged as an error (a broken link).

With namespaces is is much harder, since one does not de-reference
them, it is harder to be sure that you got the right one.  I've
had XSLT processors silently ignore stylesheets and documents pass
through XSLT processors in weird ways when I type in the URI 
slightly incorrectly.  What a headache.   At least for the 
"literal" interpretation I can glance at the file and determine
exactly what is being compared.  

With an "absolutization" of relative URI references, this 
"broken link" debugging is going to be far harder.  The
absolutization requirement effectively adds a macro processor
to the begin of every process... so what you see is not
really what is actually being submitted.  Yuck.  I can just
imagine being called in for a 3AM production failure when
a relative link fails.

I'm just saying we should be careful about our assumption
of useability of "relative URI references" for namespaces
just because they have been successfully deployed for
web sites where "http:" stands for "HyperText Transfer 
Protocol" instead of "please ignore me".

When I have a guest, and ask them to sit down ... and then
remember just as they are sitting down that the chair in 
question is broken, I apologise profusely and move them to
another chair before they hurt themselves.  Making mistakes
is acceptable... as long as they are identified quickly and 
reported so that consumers can adapt.

;) Clark

Received on Friday, 9 June 2000 12:10:10 UTC