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Re: Re: URIs, concrete (was Re: Un-ask the question)

• To: Tim Bray <tbray@t...>
• Subject: Re: Re: URIs, concrete (was Re: Un-ask the question)
• From: Uche Ogbuji <uche.ogbuji@f...>
• Date: Sat, 03 Aug 2002 08:49:19 -0600
• Cc: Joe English <jenglish@f...>, xml-dev@l...
• In-reply-to: Message from Tim Bray <tbray@t...> of "Fri, 02 Aug 2002 14:33:13 PDT." <3D4AFA99.1050903@t...>
• Sender: uche.ogbuji@f...

> Joe English wrote:
> > Kian-Tat Lim wrote:
> 
> >>Well, then, why is the definition of an XML namespace
> >>"a collection of names, identified by a URI reference
> >>[RFC2396], which are used in XML documents as element
> >>types and attribute names"?
> > 
> > I have no idea why it's defined that way.  That sentence is
> > at best meaningless, and at worst wrong and misleading.
> 
> I'd settle for just "wrong".  Some recent thinking on how to reword this 
> may be found at
> 
>   http://www.textuality.com/xml/xmlSW.html
> 
> I think if I ever decided to edit this thing again, I would include 
> something along the lines of Amy's language, that namespace names are 
> strings which follow the syntactic rules for URI references, and that 
> making them dereferencable may be a good and useful practice but MUST 
> not be necessary for the base use case of disambiguation. -Tim

IIRC, it was John Cowan rather than Amy (well, he said URI, not URI ref).  At 
any rate, I think the latter part is the key.  XMLNS should clearly say that 
it does not require resolution or retrieval for purposes of disambiguation, 
than string comparison is the only acceptable algorithm for this.

If XMLNS were to change to make the strings syntactically URI refs, would it 
not require a change of the edict forbidding relative namespaces?  Not that I 
know anything abou that edict except through rumor.


-- 
Uche Ogbuji                                    Fourthought, Inc.
http://uche.ogbuji.net    http://4Suite.org    http://fourthought.com
Track chair, XML/Web Services One Boston: http://www.xmlconference.com/
Basic XML and RDF techniques for knowledge management, Part 7 - 
http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-think12.html
Keeping pace with James Clark - http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/libra
ry/x-jclark.html
Python and XML development using 4Suite, Part 3: 4RDF - 
http://www-105.ibm.com/developerworks/education.nsf/xml-onlinecourse-bytitle/8A
1EA5A2CF4621C386256BBB006F4CEC

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