J. Clark on Bats

From: James Clark (jjc@JCLARK.COM)
>Dan Connolly wrote:
>
>> But then the WG decided to include #fragids and changed the spec
>> to say "URI reference", little realizing that this also
>> allowed relative URI references.
>
>It was actually brought up several times. See the threads starting at:
...
>I don't know why the editors chose not to do anything about it.  The XML
>WG never made a decision to allow relative URIs.

FWIW, my recollection is that Dan told the group that once we'd said
it was a URI reference we couldn't say anything more, because were within
the scope of the RFC and couldn't micromanage within that scope.  But that
was a long time ago and I could be wrong.  My sense is that the WG had
consensus and would have banned 'em given the choice.

Mind you, the namespace spec *does* forbid empty URI as namespace
names, thereby going beyond the RFC, sigh...   But forbidding empty names 
is the only way to make defaulting work sanely, so we were pretty well 
stuck there.

>If a significant constituency thinks it's obvious relative namespace
>URIs should be handled one way, and another significant constituency
>thinks it's obvious they should be handled in another incompatible way,
>the only reasonable solution I can see at this point is to phase
>out/disallow/deprecate them.

I don't think either way is obvious at all.  But deprecation does seem
to be the conservative, safe, thing to do at this point. -Tim

Received on Tuesday, 23 May 2000 02:21:47 UTC