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Re: RDDL: proposal to document the target namespace of a RDDL

• To: xml-dev@l...
• Subject: Re: RDDL: proposal to document the target namespace of a RDDL document.
• From: Eric van der Vlist <vdv@d...>
• Date: Tue, 02 Apr 2002 22:35:08 +0200
• References: <D7155AD41ECFD511AF4A00B0D0202CB51DFFE2@m...>
• User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:0.9.9) Gecko/20020324

Michael Brennan wrote:

> 
> I personally don't think that this by itself adds much value. RDDL, in its
> current form, relies upon the derefencing of a namespace URI to get the RDDL
> document, so an application always knows in advance what the "target
> namespace" is. Having a simple link in the document for this is redundant
> and adds no value.

That's not true at all. If I open http://rddl.org or follow a link to 
http://rddl.org in my browser, the URL bar displays 
"http://www.openhealth.org/RDDL/" and I have absolutely no way to know 
which namespace is documented.

I think that, on the contrary, this is the major flaw in the current RDDL.

> 
> On the other hand, if greater flexibility is desired such that the document
> can associate resources with a namespace URI without having to be at the end
> of the namespace URI, then adapting RDDL to support an extended link format
> seems a more appropriate approach, and one that affords greater flexibility
> than using a simple link that is supposed to support the notion of a "target
> namespace". This approach could permit you to associate resources with URIs
> other than namespace URIs, such as public ids (as one example), as well. 

But this would break the simplicity of RDDL and to do more complex 
things, I would much prefer using RDF...

My proposal is more than a dirty hack when you think about it. The 
document (in whatever location if is) is a container which documents a 
target namespace by defining a bunch of resources. This translates 
pretty well into RDF to associate resources defined into different RDDL 
documents describing the same namespace if you had to.

And it makes RDDL documents movable which IMO is fundamental as well: I 
feel very uncomfortable with documents which meaning changes when you 
move them!

Eric

> I had hoped to implement a proof-of-concept using such an approach, but it
> was just a spare time activity and I got bogged down with other issues
> (namely, building some editor plugins for Eclipse [1]). I hope to get back
> into that effort once I get through tax time.
> 
> [1] http://www.eclipse.org/
> 
-- 
See you in Barcelona.
                               http://www.xmleurope.com/2002/schedule.asp
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Eric van der Vlist       http://xmlfr.org            http://dyomedea.com
http://xsltunit.org      http://4xt.org           http://examplotron.org
------------------------------------------------------------------------

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  • RE: RDDL: proposal to document the target namespace of a RDDL document.
    • From: Michael Brennan <Michael_Brennan@A...>

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