Re: Are *relative* URIs as namespace nemes considered harmful?

At 07:46 PM 5/23/00 +0700, James Clark wrote:
>If I have a low level layer that doesn't make a distinction between two
>namespace names even though the namespace names identify different
>resources, it will be difficult to build on top of this a higher level
>layer that uses the namespace name directly to access the resource,
>because it will be ambiguous what the resource associated with a
>namespace name is.
>
>The other way around isn't a problem.  If a low-level layer says
>"http://www.w3.org/" and "http://WWW.W3.ORG/" are distinct, then there's
>still a well-defined mapping from namespace names to resources that can
>be used by higher level layers.
>
>In general, a higher level layer can easily identify things that lower
>level layers distinguish, but it's awkward for a higher level layer to
>distinguish things that a lower level layer identifies.

In general, perhaps, but I'm not convinced that this general statement
holds up in this case.  So long as the higher levels have a base URI to
work with for processing (likely, as something invoked the parser), they
can do as well as the XML parser at this task.

In fact, if XBase is decided to have an effect on XML Namespaces, those
higher levels may be able to do a better job of correctly identifying
namespace URIs than the lower levels, given their understanding of XBase
semantics.

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 Tuesday, 23 May 2000 08:58:26 UTC