Re: Re Deprecate/Undefined (was Request for status dump and issues check)

At 8:24 PM +0100 6/23/00, David Carlisle wrote:
>  >  I'm not
>>  convinced that forbidding relative syntax in the NS declaration is a
>>  signficant step beyond that point.
>
>forbid is OK so long as it's clear it will stay forbidden (ie there isn't
>an intention of introducing element names that depend on context
>with a NS version 2 in a year's time)

I'm not sure that this is a reasonable constraint. Many systems 
evolve discontinuously, and that's one reason to have version 
numbers. In the standards world, unlike the software world, the 
pressure to upgrade can be resisted indefinitely if an urgent need is 
met by the old standard but not a new one. I'm not convinced that 
moving namespaces in the direction Dan and Tim B-L seem to favor is 
the right idea, but that's a case that we certainly have the freedom 
to revisit in a distinct (and detectable) revision of the namespaces 
specification.

>But I think people underestimate how many documents this would break
>(if the systems enforced it). I would remove all relative URI from
>any namespace declarations on my files (I'll do that anyway, I think:-)
>but it's really not difficult  to find examples of use of such
>namespace names with a bit of websearching, and probably the majority
>of XML files currently aren't directly viewable on the web as browser
>support means server side transform to html is common, (or the files
>are private anyway). So any estimate of the number of files broken by
>forbid would just be a total guess.
>
>If forbid really is the best option, I don't know of any good way of
>reaching these people and asking them to change their documents. If
>the tools don't change, then of course, in practice they won't change
>their documents. Perhaps that's the price of progress, but perhaps no
>one would be immensely surprised if I said that I would think that
>literal+deprecate or fixed-base would be preferable to forbid, however
>forbid is OK, and anything at all is preferable to "make absolute".
>
>
>David

This is the issue that causes many of us to favor a deprecation 
strategy for the current namespace rec. where the problems that we've 
identified are crystal clear. Later versions, if they are marked in 
the data, can then redefine or forbid relative URIs after an 
appropriate discussion.

   -- David
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Received on Friday, 23 June 2000 19:50:16 UTC