Re: Minimum required of a system called "Namespaces in XML"

>My possibly very mistaken impression (counterexamples, please speak up) is
that almost >all of its defenders are those who were intimately involved in
creating it.

I'm another who had no involvement in creating the NS spec. I'd still
rather not see it retroactively changed, on the principle that it's bad
practice to break something unless absolutely necessary. Unfortunately,
some folks believe that we have to break _something_ in order to achieve
consistancy between the existing approved-and-published specs.

Oh well.

The real lesson here may be the same as the Challenger tragedy -- Sorry,
folks, but even though we've commercialized the web this is all still
experimental technology. There _are_ going to be unexpected events and
public failures. The test should not be "are all the specs perfect", but
"are they managed in such a way that the remaining risks are minimized."

>Any revision of the namespace spec should make it absolutely clear what is
expected of >a namespace name in terms of what it identifies or might
identify and why URI references >are used for this purpose.

Half-agree: Any revision should make clear the rationalle of why URI
references (or, in the Forbid case, URI+)  was chosen. But the answer to
"what does it identify" is, as far as the Namespace spec itself is
concerned, "a point in URI space". Whether anything can be retrieved by
accessing that point it out of scope for this spec.

Received on Monday, 12 June 2000 09:08:23 UTC