Re: Can everyone be happy?

Tim Berners-Lee wrote:
> 
> <flame condescension="on" spellchecker="0" frustration="98%"  >

Goodness, Tim! You observe quite rightly that it's no fun
to be the W3C team member trying to represent the needs
of one community in the midst of another community. I personally
play that role between you and the participants of the W3C
XML-related working groups fairly regularly. You do
not make that part of my job any easier with this sort
of flame. Count to 10 or something next time, please.

The fact is, you and I are party to the agreement in
the XML Namespaces Recommendation.
We neglected to review it closely, and we decided to
make it a Recommendation despite a questionable level
of consensus, and despite advice from the WG chair
that we slow down.

I now think the namespaces spec goes against the spirit
of the URI spec. I think that sucks. But it's internally
coherent, and folks have followed our Recommendation
to study it and deploy it as written. We might possibly
reconsider that recommendation, but we cannot deny
having made it.


> David said,
> 
> > there seems to be fairly clear consensus that nothing in
> >particular need be identified by the namespace name if used as a URI.
> 
> This is a typical misuse of terminology by the few left on this list
> who do not understand the model in the URI specification.

Perhaps... but you're misusing the terms from the Namespaces spec.
The namespaces spec just doesn't say "a namespace
is identified by a URI". It says "we use URI reference syntax
for namespace names; that allows you to take advantage
of the allocation mechanism for URIs, but it doesn't mean
that namespace names are URIs."

[...]

> If, as Eve suggests, the xml subcommunity (maybe out of pure "not invented
> here" syndrome)
> would like to break free of nasty URIs and reinvent an entire new system
> under their own control,

The Namespaces spec already established a new space that's distinct
from the space wherein URIs are bound to resources. W3C endorsed
that spec; you and I are party to that agreement.

The Namespaces spec allows you to use the delegation of authority
etc. from URIs, but it doesn't require you to. It says you
can use "foo" if you think you can get away with it.

> and re-attack the problems of establishment and
> delegation
> of authority, and distributed name services, then that is of course the
> choice
> which  anyone can make, and people do indeed try this every few years.
> 
> The advisory comittee would have to think very hard about pledging resources
> to such a fragmentary effort and I would have to think very hard as to
> whether
> I would see XML as a useful markup language for the web.
> 
> </flame>
> >David
> 
> Tim

-- 
Dan Connolly, W3C http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/

Received on Thursday, 22 June 2000 12:53:12 UTC