Re: How namespace names might be used

On Sat, 10 Jun 2000, Michael Mealling wrote:

> On Sat, Jun 10, 2000 at 03:29:13PM -0700, 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.  
> 
> Why can't content negotiation handle this? The CONNEG working group
> is looking at being able to express just such relationships...

Because content negotiation implies that you connect to a known IP address
derived from the URI in question and tell it what kind of information you
want regarding that URI.  IOW, you go to the namespace's owner.  Tim has
been trying to point out that we need to be able to access useful
information about a namespace that isn't entirely under the control of a
single owner.

Received on Saturday, 10 June 2000 22:30:57 UTC