Re: Can everyone be happy?

PLEASE NOTE: None of the proposals currently on the table care either way
about this issue. All of them will permit URIs to be specified as namespace
names, and in fact all of them require that the declaration be in either
URI or URIRef syntax. So I think the whole metadata issue is a serious
digression.


Just to document why I feel that way:

>Perhaps a better example would have been:
>    <elt xmlns:a="http://www.sushi.org/squid-doc.html" nstype:a="htmldoc">
>which indicates that the URI points at documentation in HTML form.

This seems to be another flavor of my xmlns-binding: example. That can be
done no matter what form the Namespace Name takes; we could equivalently
(and more flexibly, and I admit more verbosely) have written

    <elt xmlns:a="http://www.sushi.org/squid-ns"

xmlns:ns-htmldoc="http://www.w3.org/NamespaceForDocumentingNamespaces"
     ns-htmldoc:a="http://www.sushi.org/squid-doc.html">


There really is no requirement that the namespace name itself be
dereferencable in order to associate metadata with it. Having it do so may
be a significant convenience if and when some standard is developed for
what kinds of metadata we expect to associate with a namespace. But only a
convenience, not a necessity... and clearly there's plenty of room to
experiment with alternative syntax and semantics for expressing the
association of semantics and syntax.



______________________________________
Joe Kesselman  / IBM Research

Received on Thursday, 22 June 2000 20:05:39 UTC