looking for packaging, not a schema

At 12:01 PM 5/18/00 +0100, John Aldridge wrote:
RJ>>  2) it is not the XML Schemas job to say what a NS URI resolves to.
>
>This is the crux.  The namespace URI will end up having lots of associated 
>data.  A schema is one example.  HTML documentation is another.  Come to 
>that, Schemas Version 2 in a few years time.  The problem of associating 
>information with a namespace needs a more general solution.
>
>This solution, morever, should be catalogue based, not derived from markup 
>in the document itself.  The fact that a namespace is documented in some 
>http://whatever file is a property of the namespace, not of the particular 
>use of the namespace in some XML document.

Doesn't it seem like this kind of schema referencing is a job for the
never-quite-started XML Packaging activity?  

Making namespace URIs point to something as specific as a schema seems like
a bad idea, especially for those of us who might rather point to an HTML
document, a DTD, a RELAX schema, or some other description.

We've been in this territory before with namespaces (see the XHTML 1.0
debate), and it seems widely agreed that Namespaces+Schemas is inadequate
at best, pernicious at worst.  Where's packaging?

Simon St.Laurent
XML Elements of Style / XML: A Primer, 2nd Ed.
Building XML Applications
Inside XML DTDs: Scientific and Technical
Cookies / Sharing Bandwidth
http://www.simonstl.com

Received on Thursday, 18 May 2000 08:33:56 UTC