Re: Swamped (Was:Re: Call the question!)

At 04:43 PM 5/22/00 -0400, keshlam@us.ibm.com wrote:
>OPTION 3: TREAT NAMESPACE NAMES AS LITERALS. Namespace Names are just Text
>Strings whose value should be expressed in URI Reference form. This is the
>behavior intended by the Namespace Working Group.
>
>+: All names remain stable , permitting reliable namespace-aware document
>processing.
>+: Names can be compared via a simple string comparison.
>+: It would support those users who have been using Namespaces as a way of
>binding to external references, relying on the fact that Namespaces 1.0
>permitted relative syntax; they would retrieve the string and the base URI
>and perform the absolutize operation ("absolution"? No, let's not go
>there...) in application code.
>-: According to one subset of the community, this choice does violence to
>the concept of URIs, or at least to the concept that everything in the
>network-universe can be named via a URI Reference.
>
>^:The wording of the Namespace spec would have to be cleaned up to clarify
>that these are not URIs, but strings in URI syntax.
>^: Some of the other specs (eg XPath?) which reference Namespaces would
>need to be rewritten to reflect this understanding. Others already have
>this behavior.

On this last bit, I'm not sure that they would need to be rewritten beyond
making explicit that their behavior goes beyond what's specified in
'Namespaces in XML'.

I'm also not certain that the Namespaces Rec would in fact need to be
reopened, but that I'll leave for now.

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 Monday, 22 May 2000 17:38:40 UTC