Re: trying RDDL for xml: namespace

Jeff Rafter wrote:
> 
> Dan,
> 
> I think this is great!  Thanks for putting that together. From RDDL:
> 
> "A Resource Directory Description is designed to be suitable for service as
> the body of a resource returned by dereferencing a URI serving as an XML
> Namespace name."
> 
> In my browser when I simply plop in the namespace I got the XML Schema.
> Shouldn't resolving the namespace URL actually take you to the RDDL document
> to begin with instead of the schema?

Resolving the namespace URL should get you some document
about the namespace. If you care whether you get RDDL
or an XML Schema, you have to say so using HTTP Accept
headers; as I said:

> > There's some .xml and .xsd stuff still lying around,
> > so to GET it, you have to use:
[...]
> >   wget --header="Accept:text/html" http://www.w3.org/XML/1998/namespace

Now our web server could be configured so that,
in the absence of Accept headers, it serves RDDL
in preference to XML Schemas.

Of course, the HTTP server doesn't know about RDDL
and XML Schemas; it just knows about MIME types.
Our server is configured to map .xsd to application/xml
and .html to text/html. So we're
treating RDDL as text/html which isn't
explicitly licensed by the specs for text/html
and XHTML 1.0. So I'm on thin ice as it is;
our webmaster guys are not going to be
receptive to endorsing what I'm doing, cuz
they'll get heat from the HTML WG folks (hi Mimasa!).


>  Technically an RDDL enabled parser
> should be able to follow that path.

I don't want RDDL parsing to be necessary to find the XML Schema.

>  A human could simply click the link.  I
> think this is slightly different from adding .html to the end (as that isn't
> common knowledge) and I think that making the RDDL document the default
> would help people who are digging around-- the schema could always be
> returned by specifying application/xml or text/xml in the header.  What do
> you think?

As I say, yes, it would be nice if human users got text/html by
default, but strictly speaking, RDDL isn't text/html.


-- 
Dan Connolly, W3C http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/

Received on Wednesday, 23 May 2001 12:27:06 UTC