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Re: Question About Namespaces and DTDs

• From: "Winchel 'Todd' Vincent, III" <winchel@m...>
• To: "Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@s...>, xml-dev@l...
• Date: Tue, 25 Jul 2000 11:08:16 -0400

Thank you very much for your earlier response.  I need to read and think for
a bit.  However, one quick comment given the thread on "Public Identifiers."

<Todd>
> >A further thought . . . to be manageable, it seems to me that this would
> >require a registry of prefixes for the particular industry.   Assuming a
> >registry were possible, would namespaces and DTDs mix?
</Todd>

<SimonStLaurent>
> They could, but I think some folks at the W3C would be aghast at the
> suggestion that URIs weren't the right answer.
</SimonStLaurent>

It seems to me that URIs would be the right answer if there were a
one-to-one relationship between URI and namespace prefixes, rather than a
one-to-many relationship (i.e., unique prefixes via a fixed association with
a URI).

I have been thinking that it would also be nice if there were some
requirement (perhaps an optional feature in parsers) that allowed one to
fetch the schema/DTD at the end of the namespace URI.  If there were at
least a moral responsibity on the owner to keep the schema/DTD at the end of
the URI the same (or tell people when it changed) (or a perhaps a
responsibility on the user to hash/sign it, so you know if it has changed),
then namespaces would be tied to a vocabulary that gave them meaning (now
and in the future), rather than simply being a means of avoiding technical
element collision.  This is what I thought "semantic web" meant and was
disappointed to find it didn't.

Todd

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