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Re: more QName madness

• To: xml-dev@l...
• Subject: Re: more QName madness
• From: "Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@s...>
• Date: Sat, 16 Nov 2002 10:09:56 -0500
• In-reply-to: <20021116073320.A28903@r...>

veillard@r... (Daniel Veillard) writes:
> Also the existing RFCs describing URI say that the meaning of the 
>fragment identifier is to be found in the description of the Mime-Type
>associated to the returned resource. The scheme you suggest invites to
>the proliferation of schemes without having a mechanism in place to
>insure that binding to the description of the Mime-Type. Mime-Type are
>limited, but at least their description is a place to make the
>association to the semantic of the associated scheme.

Precisely.  There is already a mechanism in place for defining this
information, and it's far from clear that creating a wide-open URI-based
scheme inside of that mechanism actually produces an interoperability
benefit.

My suspicion is that there is a very limited number of "generic" XML
schemes that make sense - less than 20, even if I stretch my
imagination.  Pretty much every scheme beyond that will be specific to a
particular vocabulary.  Vocabularies which want to define their own
fragment identifier approaches should go to the trouble of registering a
MIME Media Type for their vocabulary.  It's really not that difficult.

> Schemes are my baby in a way, I do think they are a very important
>feature, but I can't see how suggesting to open up their usage without
>a way to also bind the definition can be useful and not actually
>prevent them from being deployed. If they don't work in practice,
>people won't use them, and support is not gonna grow. Be realistic,
>there is no way people providing browsing support are gonna start
>chasing schemes defined randomly, you will need a registry, if you
>don't bind to the existing IETF suggested practice to define them I'm
>afraid it will at best turn in a big mess, and at worse never
>deploy...

I agree completely.  I like schemes, and think they're an important
innovation.  We need to make sure that innovation fits cleanly with the
existing context, however.

-------------
Simon St.Laurent - SSL is my TLA
http://simonstl.com may be my URI
http://monasticxml.org may be my ascetic URI
urn:oid:1.3.6.1.4.1.6320 is another possibility altogether

• References:
  • Re: more QName madness
    • From: Daniel Veillard <veillard@r...>

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