Re: A little courtesy, please (resource questions)

At 01:09 PM 5/24/00 -0500, Dan Connolly wrote:
>My motivation for changing the namespace spec isn't just the way
>RDF works... it's the inconsistency between the way relative URI
>references are specified to work in the namespace spec (i.e.
>that you can meaningfully compare them across documents without
>absolutizing them) and the way they're used in every other
>spec (HTTP, HTML, XML Linking, XSLT, ...) and every implementation
>I know of.

(Realizing that this is a thread that's gone quiet in the last couple of 
days, but being unwilling to catch up on a week's worth of all the other 
threads to see if this point has been raised...)

Relative URI references are used in all those other specs in order to 
facilitate *access*, not *comparison*, and obviously absolutizing is 
essential before access.  (XPath is the exception in the list above, but it 
clearly disagrees with an older REC, and so could be considered to have a 
bug in it.)  The Namespaces spec explicitly mandates comparison, and is 
careful not to mandate access.  Given that the concept of a relative URI 
reference is defined in RFC 2396, I see no reason to claim 
inconsistency.  The Namespaces spec merely chooses to specify some behavior 
on a string before it undergoes a particular transformation operation, not 
after.

         Eve
--
Eve Maler                                    +1 781 442 3190
Sun Microsystems XML Technology Center    elm @ east.sun.com

Received on Friday, 26 May 2000 13:07:40 UTC