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Schemas, namespaces, versioning

• To: xml-dev@l...
• Subject: Schemas, namespaces, versioning
• From: Tim Bray <tbray@t...>
• Date: Fri, 19 Jul 2002 12:54:56 -0700
• References: <20020718161054.88979.qmail@w...>
• User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en-US; rv:1.1a) Gecko/20020610

Dare Obasanjo wrote:

[about the year/month showing in w3c namespace names]
 >
 > I hope this isn't official W3C policy because it is
 > very poorly thought out. We at Microsoft are already
 > having problems with the fact that RECs like W3C XML
 > Schema add backwards incompatible changes in errata
 > does breaking our customer's previously working
 > schemata when they get a patch or upgrade for no fault
 > of their own or ours.

I think the news in this area is mostly pretty bad.  Versioning of
schemas and namespaces and markup-processing software in general is just
an insanely hard problem, and furthermore one where needs vary
dramatically from application to application.  For every argument that
says you should change the namespace upon a version rev, you're going to
have people on the other side saying that the version rev didn't change
anything for them so why are you breaking their software?  I suspect
that work on finding general solutions just isn't cost-effective, but we
instead have a set of hard case-by-case judgement calls.

The W3C's including years in URIs is actually pretty clever - it is
simply a technique for helping manage URI-space in a way that's less
likely to undergo breakage with the passage of time.  For example, the
TAG's home page is http://www.w3.org/2001/tag.

There are many big enterprises, in particular Microsoft, that would
benefit themselves and the world hugely if they would start showing a
little investment in preserving the integrity and longevity of addresses
in their own web-space.  There is just no excuse for the cavalier way
that things in MSDN and microsoft.com space shift around and move and
are essentially impossible to bookmark.  -Tim

• Follow-Ups:
  • Re: Schemas, namespaces, versioning
    • From: "Rick Jelliffe" <ricko@a...>

• References:
  • Re: Schema Namespace name, schemaLocation, and Schema V ersioning
    • From: Dare Obasanjo <kpako@y...>

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