Re: A little courtesy, please

>It is not at all completely obvious how you can say that while
>also saying:
>
>4. It is wrong to compromise the basic utility of namespaces by imposing
>   strict URI-ness on them
>
>5. The use of relative URI references as namespace names is wrong and
>   dangerous and should be, at the least, deprecated"

The way one says this consistantly is to divide the question.

* Namespaces have utility whether they are bound to URI references or not.

* Such binding may in fact be desirable, but can be achieved in many ways.

* Strict URI-ness of namespace names is one such way, but yields
undesirable behavior of namespaces per se.

* Switching to another binding mechanism would get us out of this conflict,
allowing the namespace name to be "just a name" while still allowing the
name to (indirectly) refer to a web resource. As far as web architecture
goes, this is equivalent to having the namespace name itself be the
resource, and so is completely consistant with the architecture... but it
recognizes that namespace names have their own requirements which URI
References are not a good match for.

>> So, like, guys, we understand what you're saying.
>That's not at all clear.

Actually, I think it _is_ pretty clear at this point that folks understand
that there are conflicting goals. The question is how to reconcile those
conflicts. We can either break the consistancy of how Namespaces are
interpreted, break the consistancy of how URIRefs are interpreted, or
accept that the Namespace name is not itself a URIRef and that the
Namespace spec was in error when it made that assertion.


>I largely agree with this, but I cannot agree that treating relative
>URI references as namespace names without absolutizing them is in
>the spirit of RDF.

How Hard Would It Really Be to say that the absolutization -- or the
additional retrieval to find the binding to an absolutized URIRef -- is
RDF's problem, rather than that of the Namespace Name?

Received on Tuesday, 23 May 2000 09:51:34 UTC