Re: Toward the self-describing web [was: Irony heaped on irony]

   David Carlisle wrote:

   > The relative namespace issue is really not so important, despite the
   > heat it generates.

   No, but honoring one's commitments *is* so important.

well I agree with this (especially as I have software and documents that
would be broken by a change to the namespace rec to introduce the notion
of making namespace names absolute) although it would probably take less
time to fix the documents  than it does to argue on this list...
seing as i don't care what the namespace is when I use local namespaces
in xsl stylesheets, I'd just do a global replace sticking mailto:
in front of all the namespace names. That makes them absolute so immune
from any proposed change.

   > suggestion that there _must_ be a resource, at the namesapce uri
   > would just be a complete change in the way namespaces work.

   Remember that a resource is abstract, not necessarily equivalent to
   an entity body.  At any one time there may be zero, one, or many
   entity bodies corresponding to a given resource.

yes I take your point about entity v resource, I shoould have chosen my
words better, but the suggestion that  a new namespace rec should
indicate that using a http  uri for the namespace implies that the URI
should `work' and not return a 404 would be a big change (and break most
of the java xslt engines which allow you to generate a http uri as a
namsepace to access java extensions. (in fact it would invalidate vast
numbers of existing documents)

David

Received on Friday, 19 May 2000 14:10:38 UTC