RE: Language = Namespace. was: How namespace names might be used

On Mon, 19 Jun 2000, Julian Reschke wrote:

> Tim Berners-Lee wrote:
> > - a namespace corresponds to a language.  I know that some don't want this
> > model but honestly without it all work on XML should stop
> > immediately and be
> > restarted with a proper footing. What is XHTML? a Language! That
> > is actually
> > what the letter stands for. There is meaning in it.  The meaning is NOT
> > carried by out of band discussion, it is carried in the XHTML
> > specification.
> 
> So how do you plan to resolve the issue that there are three different DTDs
> for HTML? Should they be mapped into just one XML schema?
> 
> I fear that this statement (taken together with many of Dan's earlier
> remarks) confirms that there is a disconnect about how things are supposed
> to work. If your goal is to have
> 
> 	namespace ~ language
> 
> 	namespace name ~ URI where a schema (or another language definition)
> resides
> 
> then IMHO this needs to be formalized and treated as an official W3C
> document (with members voting on it and so on).

I would agree, if "language" is taken as meaning the same thing as
"application" does in SGML.  A "language" in that sense is a property of a
*document*, but the the Namespaces Rec doesn't talk about a document's
namespace, only an element's namespace or an attribute's namespace.  The
NSR doesn't say anything about the syntactic rules of a namespace, though
the XML Recommendation and the Schema WD talk a lot about the syntactic
rules of what SGML would call applications.

There's a Dublin Core namespace, and I can talk about, say, a "creator"
element or attribute in this namespace.  But for the life of me I can't
come up with a meaningful mental picture of what a document written in the
Dublin Core "language" would look like, or what a schema for such a
"language" would look like.  I don't see a 1-1 correspondence here;
instead I see that "creator" has a property called "namespace" that
corresponds to the *sense* of the *word* in English, not the *grammar* for
the *sentence* in which it's used.  I guess I think of a namespace as a
"collection of terminology," and I *don't* see "collection of
terminology" as synonymous with "language," just as I don't (unlike some
postmodern theorists) see a scientific vocabulary as being the same thing
as a science.

Received on Monday, 19 June 2000 17:49:39 UTC