RE: SIgh [was: Irony heaped on irony]

Thank you Mike. I certainly do not intend to prevent applications layered
on top of XML from doing anything. Indeed, this is why I tried to persuade
the other spec authors not to use the phrase "namespace URI" for the
string that has not be resolved to absolute form.  I fully expect that it will
be necessary for applications to either do the resolution or to have the
process done by a interface layer such as DOM, SAX etc.

The ordinal ballot clearly stated that the scope of the decision was only
for attribute equivalence tests and for mapping namespaces to processing
applications...words were taken directly from the Namespace spec.

As one who believes that the literal approach is workable, all of my namespace
aware application designs use the namespace name to also be a viable
computing entity; however, some of them use custom lookup engines and
not standard URL/URI resolution. I do this at the application level, not at the XML 
level. I don't expect this behavior to be interoperable, but it is very useful.
And the ability to manage a namespace offline is critical since at least in one
case the project specifications state that much of the processing must be 
done isolated from the network.

Regards,
Dave Hollander

Mike Champion writes:
 > There's no doubt that various specs need to have ambiguities clarified and
 > inconsistencies ironed out, but the only people seriously inconvenienced by
 > the Namespace spec as it stands are those who want to use relative URIs in
 > namespace names *and* have generic XML software do the grunt work of
 > absolutizing the URIs before comparing them.  Some application-specific code
 > could do this, and some spec that references XML (e.g. RDF) could require
 > *its* implementers to do this kind of thing, right?  
 >
 > In other words, I see the situation from very much the opposite perspective
 > as Mr. Berners-Lee: XML and the namespace spec *allow* RDF users and
 > "semantic web" visionaries to do what they want to do, they just don't
 > *insist* that the rest of the XML world do things the RDF/semantic web way.

__________________________________________________________
Dave Hollander
Co-Chair W3C XML CG and Plenary
Co-Chair W3C XML Schema Working Group
dmh@info2000.net
970-613-0605
__________________________________________________________
"Of all the things I've lost, I miss my mind the most" 
Sheila Landy, mother of 2

Received on Tuesday, 23 May 2000 12:04:33 UTC