Re: jettisoning baggage

At 08:03 PM 2000-06-14 -0400, Simon St.Laurent wrote:

>So long as we have unique identifiers, we can safely build infrastructure
>to support them.  There is nothing sacred about namespaces beyond 'unique
>identifiers' and a set of syntactical tools for making those unique
>identifiers work in XML.
>
>I suppose that makes me a strong advocate of 'literal'.

Or does it make you a likely customer for the urn:oid scheme?

Literal comparison doesn't get you uniqueness.  That's inverse logic.

What selecting literal, or selecting absolutized, as the basis of
comparison does is this: it makes precise the terms of reference for
accounting how far off you are from achieving uniqueness.  Neither one will
ipso_facto get you there.  That's a whole 'nother battle.

You don't have unique identifiers; you can't safely build infrastructure on
the premise that you have them.  So get on with the business of life.  You
need to sanity check your namespace recognitions.  And you can improve the
chances that the namespace declarations you encode don't collide by
following reasonable best practices.  But that's as far as it gets.  Some
drunk can still kill you if you go out on the highway, no matter how
prudently you drive.  We have already legislated to keep the drunks off the
highway; but your chances of meeting one are still non-zero.

This is the baggage we need to jettison.  The sacred 'unique' of the
identifiers.  The idea that somehow global uniqueness is a logical
prerequisite for using namespaces.  Global uniqueness will never be
achieved beyond the attainment of low collision rates.  The statistics can
be improved through use of devices such as the urn:oid: scheme.  But
guaranteed uniqueness is not in the cards.  Don't loose sleep over it.

Al

>
>Simon St.Laurent
>XML Elements of Style / XML: A Primer, 2nd Ed.
>http://www.simonstl.com - XML essays and books
>

Received on Wednesday, 14 June 2000 23:17:20 UTC