Re: where's the beef?

At 05:22 PM 2000-05-19 -0400, keshlam@us.ibm.com wrote:
>>If the "URIs are URIs, dammit" camp can just accept the literal comparison
>>as the appropriate shortcut processing, and the literalists can just
>accept
>>that this processing may have to be backed up with dereferencing the
>>namespace URI or some other URI-form link in occasional cases _to identify
>>appropriate processing, not to disambiguate tokens_,
>
>The literalists are generally _VERY_ happy to say that literal comparison
>affects only token recognition, since token recognition is all that
>Namespaces were designed to address. If you retrieve the namespace name and
>put it through other processing, you've stepped completely out of the scope
>of the namespace recommendation.
> 

I am not trying to be purposefully difficult, here, but you sailed straight
past what I thought was a crucial distinction I was making.  You would seem
to be treating two things as equal that I was trying to distinguish.

This is the difference between _distinguishing_ (a.k.a. disambiguating) the
tokens one from another within the scope of a single document, and
_recognizing_ names, i.e. binding these tokens to information nodes in a
larger processing context.

If we can somehow agree on mutual terminology for the distinction I am
trying to make, maybe a lot of the heat would abate.  To me, name
recognition is context dependent, and I mean process context, not
XML-document-bounded context.  

Digression to example:  In XML Schemas on may import a name from one
namespace into another.  A Schema-processing XML-Instance-processor will
thus recognize some names which are in different namespaces as the same
name, whereas a Schema-non-processing XML-Instance-processor will see two
distinct names.  In this sense, name 'recognition' is overloaded and may
return different results on different processing levels.

I think that we may actually be in flaming agreement, here.  

You say, "If you retrieve the namespace name and put it through other
processing, you've stepped completely out of the scope of the namespace
recommendation."  I agree, if you would go on to say ", but not outside the
scope of namespaces as appropriately used in XML, and used in conformance
to the Namespaces in XML Recommendation."  One has stepped outside the
Namespaces Rec only in the sense of stepping into an orthogonal dimension
not comparable with the clauses in that document.  Not into a set of
instances incompatible with or disjoint from compliance with that Rec., if
we are in agreement.

To me, name _recognition_ properly belongs in that higher-dimensional space
including extensions beyond the Namespaces Rec.  That is why I was trying
to wordsmith some alternate description in mutually agreeable language of
the precise function that the Namespaces Rec. does define, definitively.

Al

Received on Friday, 19 May 2000 19:13:38 UTC