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

David Carlisle wrote:
> 
>    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)

You have documents that would break? Can you point us to them, or
share the relevant details?

[...]

> 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)

How would it break those XSLT engines? The XSLT engines I've seen
don't use HTTP to find the java code or anything, so changing the spec
to say (or suggest) that if you use http://... as a namespace name,
folks should be able to get information about that namespace
on demand by visiting that address won't affect those XSLT
engines whatsoever.

Don't you think it would be convenient if, upon finding
	xmlns:xt="http://www.jclark.com/xt/java"
I could ask "hmm... what's that all about?" by visiting
http://www.jclark.com/xt/java and getting some documentation
and examples and such?

I'm not sure what you mean by "allow you to generate an HTTP uri";
XT allows you to *use* a *particular* HTTP URI to indicate
that you want to call out to java. It doesn't have a mechanism
where you choose a namespace URI and it associates java code
with your choice of namespace URIs somehow.

(see http://www.jclark.com/xml/xt.html for documentation
of the http://www.jclark.com/xt/java namespace, btw)

-- 
Dan Connolly, W3C http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/

Received on Saturday, 20 May 2000 21:26:23 UTC