Re: How namespace names might be used

On Sat, 10 Jun 2000, Tim Bray wrote:
> But... the more I think about the packaging idea, the more it seems
> insufficiently flexible and general.  At the end of the day, it seems
> like all the different kinds of related resources (stylesheets, type
> definitions, procedural code, schemas) ought to somehow become active,
> and respond to call-by-name.  I.e. there ought to be a way to broadcast
> an appeal for stylesheets that can handle vocabularies named by 
> http://a.b.com/ns37, or Java classes that can generate audio output
> from vocabularies named http://a.b.com/ns39; this is a many-to-many
> mapping we're talking about here, because a stylesheet resource could
> probably "know about" a wide variety of vocabularies (e.g., DocBook
> derivatives) that it's capable of handling.  
> 
> Are any of the existing Internet protocols a candidate for this 
> kind of lookup-by-name?  I don't think content-negotiation goes nearly
> far enough.  Pardon me for blue-skying it.  -Tim

It sounds to me like XLink extended links could play a role here, and with
a "delegate" mechanism it might even be possible to use just HTTP to
achieve an effect similar to that of DNS (e.g. HTTP request goes to your
nearest "packaging" server, which looks for references in its local
linkbase and possibly contacts other packaging servers before returning a
linkbase describing your resource's relatives).

Received on Saturday, 10 June 2000 20:07:03 UTC