Re: Can everyone be happy?

"Paul W. Abrahams" wrote:

> But it doesn't address another lurking issue: the dissatisfaction with
> the uninterpretedness of namespace names that led TimBL to initiate these
> discussions in the first place.

What led him to initiate these discussions was the fact that many working
drafts (the Core WG's Infoset draft, the DOM Level 2, etc.) were stuck until
the literal vs. absolutize issue was resolved.  The timing, at least, was
also affected by someone who anonymously released information about this
stuckness to xml-dev.

> And the possibility remains,  as I and many others insist,
> that the namespace name identifies no useful resource at all but is
> merely a convenient and presumably unique identifier.

How can something be an identifier if it doesn't identify anything?
To use TimBL's analogy, that is a handle without a pot.

> So suppose we introduce another attribute, which I'll call `nstype'.
> Something like
> 
>     <elt xmlns:a="http://www.sushi.org/squid.schema" nstype:a="schema">
> 
> would indicate (obviously) that a schema describing the namespace whose
> namespace prefix is "a" is to be found at
> http://www.sushi.org/squid.schema.  For a namespace whose name identifies
> nothing useful, the nstype attribute would be omitted -- and we'd have
> precisely the current situation, augmented perhaps by the fixed-base
> convention.

Been there, done that.  The trouble is that a single namespace may have
many associated schemas: in the terminology I introduced yesterday, a
namespace is a vocabulary rather than a language.  TimBL prefers to say
that it is a super-language, but a language without a syntax seems to be
a self-contradictory notion.

-- 

Schlingt dreifach einen Kreis um dies! || John Cowan <jcowan@reutershealth.com>
Schliesst euer Aug vor heiliger Schau,  || http://www.reutershealth.com
Denn er genoss vom Honig-Tau,           || http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
Und trank die Milch vom Paradies.            -- Coleridge (tr. Politzer)

Received on Thursday, 22 June 2000 11:20:55 UTC