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Re: Registered Namespace prefixes

• To: Chiusano Joseph <chiusano_joseph@b...>
• Subject: Re: Registered Namespace prefixes
• From: Daniel Veillard <veillard@r...>
• Date: Wed, 26 Feb 2003 19:58:31 -0500
• Cc: Jeff Lowery <Jeff.Lowery@c...>, XML Dev <xml-dev@l...>
• In-reply-to: <3E5D5BBE.C05FBE44@b...>; from chiusano_joseph@b... on Wed, Feb 26, 2003 at 07:28:46PM -0500
• References: <4827EC373E03DB44AC2AB3900430896B0265F8@w...> <20030226131241.B16255@r...> <3E5D5BBE.C05FBE44@b...>
• Reply-to: veillard@r...
• User-agent: Mutt/1.2.5.1i

On Wed, Feb 26, 2003 at 07:28:46PM -0500, Chiusano Joseph wrote:
> >Registries are evil, 
> 
> Would you care to elaborate as to why?

  I did in the next post ...

"Instauring a registry is a perfect way to prepare a robbery onto the
enslaved masses. Prepare your checks ! Even if someone promises you
whatever freedom now, the capitalist temptation of making money on
any central authority is just impossible to resist in the long term."

  A technical solution based on a registry is by essence centralized,
prone to failure, gives a terrible control to whoever maintain them,
and basically cripples the technical framework you're trying to build
with them. When the data are very static and nearly never change it ain't
too bad, but for things like binding of public and internal identifier
it's a terrible solution, then people start to fight over names and
control of that mechanism. DNS is a prime example, but google ranking,
realnames, trademarks, domain names, Mime-Types, etc are other examples
where keeping or maintaining fair association of names and identifiers/
semantic have proven to be a pain. Usuall one cannot avoid at some point
to use a registry, DNS is there to last for best and worse and trying to
multiply registries doesn't really help, the best is to avoid them as 
much as possible.
  Now to get back to the initial proposal building a registry for
XML namespace prefixes seems impractical (one would have to modify
all the parsers ... after having changed the semantic of the specs),
this would break a lot of namespace based specs which expect scoping
this won't solve some of the hard problems which occurs when mixing
namespaces in document, this won't solve problems related to dynamic
generation of prefixes (like in XSLT), but this will create the market
for another ICANN monster, where I bet all the single letter prefixes
would suddenly become quite expensive ...

 Insane, really ...

Daniel

-- 
Daniel Veillard      | Red Hat Network https://rhn.redhat.com/
veillard@r...  | libxml GNOME XML XSLT toolkit  http://xmlsoft.org/
http://veillard.com/ | Rpmfind RPM search engine http://rpmfind.net/

• References:
  • Registered Namespace prefixes
    • From: Jeff Lowery <Jeff.Lowery@c...>
  • Re: Registered Namespace prefixes
    • From: Daniel Veillard <veillard@r...>
  • Re: Registered Namespace prefixes
    • From: "Chiusano Joseph" <chiusano_joseph@b...>

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