Re: The Kesselman/Connoly proposal (was Re: Re Deprecate /Undefined )

I'm not sure there is a "Kesselman/Connoly proposal ". My perception is
that Dan is favoring Deprecate/Undefined, as a way of avoiding having to
break existing documents. My own preference is for Forbid -- both because
Undefined is more fragile than I really like, and because Forbid more
clearly reserves the relative syntax for use if and when someone comes up
with a meaningful semantic for it.

Statement of bias: Personally, I don't expect to see such a semantic before
the XML 3.0 timeframe. Yes, I said "three". We have yet to see a good
proposal for why anyone would actually want a relative  reference to a
namespace. There have been a few architectural visions proposed, but they
haven't clearly established a scenario where relative namespaces are the
proper way to advance their goals -- never mind a complete analysis of how
that should affect the interpretation of other W3C standards supporting and
using namespaces. I think it's incumbent upon those who want to introduce a
concept which has such broad impact to present us with a complete picture
of what they want to do, why they want to do it, what the alternatives are
for expressing it, which alternative they've picked and why.

Given the current state of the Semantic Web concept, I'd be quite startled
if any such proposal is ready in less than a year. More likely two. And at
that time, my own instincts suggest we'll discover that making namespace
delarations relative isn't actually necessary, and perhaps not even useful.



Note that Undefined is a bit rough on Infoset and DOM. We really would be
happier with a clear definition of when two attributes do and don't
collide.

______________________________________
Joe Kesselman  / IBM Research

Received on Monday, 26 June 2000 19:54:43 UTC