Re: A little courtesy, please

>(Something which you compare as a string is not a relative URI.)

Reminder: Some of us -- Tim Bray among them -- have been saying for the
past month that namespace names _AREN'T_ relative URIRefs (*), and that the
Namespace spec needs an erratum saying that these names are strings...
whose recommended values just happen to follow the URI-reference syntax.

If we were doing this over from scratch they would probably be URIs (or
perhaps URNs!), thus forbidding the relative syntax entirely and
eliminating the point of contention.

As I noted elsewhere, it's a question of which of three words you consider
to be the error... and whether we can minimize the damage done by
correcting that error at this late date. Even after all this chatter, the
leading proposal for an effective solution still seems to be
Literal-and-deprecate...  which can also be described as
Forbid-with-migration-path.


(* Can we please be careful about terminology? URIs are absolute by
definition. URI References may be relative, as well as permitting a locator
suffix. Forgetting that difference is what got us into this hole in the
first place.)
______________________________________
Joe Kesselman  / IBM Research

Received on Wednesday, 24 May 2000 15:01:46 UTC