Re: Dictionares in the library

 
> From: "Tim Berners-Lee" <timbl@w3.org>
 
> T: And now we have dictionaries!
> 
> A: Yes, dictionaries are very important to me, Mr.. Tortoise. I want to use
> them to understand what some of those books mean.

The thing that lets us understand what a name means is not a namespace
but a schema and its associated documentation (and social activities).

A namespace URI is a letter in the alphabet, a part of a name, not an
entry in the 
dictionary. Indeed, without a knowledge of the context of the full name,
one may
not be able to give a definition at all (for compound information
items).

> T: But Achilles, for the last time, a dictionary is NOT  A  BOOK!

But Tim, for the last time, a namespace is not a schema.  There is no
such thing
as a "namespace document" at the current time. The status quo from W3C
membership,
as clearly expressed in the 3 DTDs issue is that there is not a
one-to-one 
relationship between a schema (e.g. a DTD) and a namespace, quite the
reverse.

The Web architecture should support a disconnection between schema and
namespace.
HTML is not the exception here, HTML is the norm.

This is not to say that some future, perfect schema language could not
be created
which could capture all variabilities and evolutions of a schema for
elements that
use a particular namespace prefix. And there may be, in some faroff
corners, some
simple markup languages which can be completely described by existing
schema
languages. 

Rick Jelliffe

Received on Tuesday, 23 May 2000 12:12:46 UTC