Re: Namespace names: a modification of a semi-serious proposal

On Sat, 27 May 2000, Simon St.Laurent wrote:
> >    DEFINE NAMESPACE EQUIVALENCE AS A BYTE-FOR-BYTE COMPARISON
> >    OF THE RESOURCE AS RESOLVED *AND* RETRIEVED.
> 
> I've got to complain about that simply on grounds of the amount of
> infrastructure required to process a 'name'.  

You snipped out 1/2 of the proposal, specifically 
the use of "data:" URI for those of us who just 
believe that a namespace URI should be used for
"identification" and not for "locating".

> Caching resources, which could conceivably be enormous

Use a 256 bit hash value; almost always gaurenteed to 
be unique and taking very little storage.

> and which might very well not exist?  

If it does not exist; then, throw a warning error
and fall back to a byte-by-byte comparison of the URI.

> Explaining that to the folks trying to process XML 
> within PDAs and even smaller devices (which were an 
> explicit goal of XML 1.0) sounds like a task
> for the extremely brave.

Let them use "data:" ... nothing is forcing 
them to use "http:" for their namespace names.

...

In this proposal, if "data:" is used for
the uri-scheme, then the traditional
byte-by-byte comparison works as expected.

It is only for those who want to not only 
*identify* but to also *locate* information
about the namespace is the "http:" required.

...

As I see it our #1 problem is finding an adequate
definition for "http:" eqivalence that does
not require resolution and retrival!  Unless I've
missed something; this is an impossible task.

Best,

Clark

Received on Saturday, 27 May 2000 20:00:31 UTC