FW: D. Carlisle lone user (was : Microsoft tools)

>David Carlisle Said:
>so far no actual examples of such Microsoft documents seem to have
>been found.

>Currently the situation appears to be that I am the unique person in
>the world that has put his hand up and said "I've used relative URI
>as namespace names" This leads several people to suggest the "forbid"
>option (because, clearly I don't count:-).

David:

I have been lurking on the public W3C namespace discussion, but following it
very closely since the matter speaks to the heart of some development work I
am doing on a global, inter-industry semantics translation system for B2B
ecommerce.

I assure you that even if Microsoft isn't doing it, you are not at all alone
in "using relative URI as namespace names".  We have been counting on it and
using it in development/design plans as well.  Not being a member of W3C
(can't afford it), we haven't been following all the arguements about all
the issues when things are only in draft stage.  Our policy has been to only
rely on full W3C Recommendations.  My reading of the rec agrees with yours
completely.  It's disturbing to find out that W3C Recommendations apparently
cannot be  relied upon unless one knows the legislative history and is
intimately familiar with the W3C staff's personal visions.  The
interpretation of the rec offered by some wherein "namespace is identified
by URI" is presumed to mean "a namespace IS a URI" seems to us completely
unjustified.  Only in formal mathematics is "identity" considered to mean
"same as", and even then formal mathematics doesn't define a "identified
by".  In normal English usage, "identified by" does not mean the same as
"is".

I wouldn't go so far as to say that we have "many documents that will break"
if the Rec is changed.  I do know a change in the REC requires us to re-do a
significant amount of design work.  The more significant issue is that it
also will cause us to question the credibility of W3C "recommendations" in
the future.



Jim Luke
Planning Solutions Group
jol@plansolutions.com
www.plansolutions.com

Received on Friday, 9 June 2000 17:44:57 UTC