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RE: Registered Namespace prefixes

• To: <xml-dev@l...>
• Subject: RE: Registered Namespace prefixes
• From: Martin Klang <martin@h...>
• Date: Thu, 27 Feb 2003 19:11:28 +0000 (GMT)
• Cc: Jeff Lowery <Jeff.Lowery@c...>
• In-reply-to: <4827EC373E03DB44AC2AB3900430896B02660B@w...>

On Thu, 27 Feb 2003, Jeff Lowery wrote:

> > From: Joe English [mailto:jenglish@f...]
> > If and when you get a registry started, I'd like to
> > reserve the 26 uppercase latin letters as prefixes
> > for my own personal use.
>
> See my posts to Dave.  Starting of with a registry based on existing
> short-string registries, along with subscoping (I'm changing my terminology
> already!) it think addresses this issue.

hey, if we allow for subscoping with slashes as well as dots, and add a
protocol specifier, (okay so we're not really talking XML 1.0 here) you
could have elements with prefixes like:
<http://www.xml.org/very/cool:element>
funky eh! who needs namespaces now! (excuses to xml.org)

i can sort of see why you'd want to register prefixes somewhere ('cos yer
lazy! (oops, sorry)), but imho you couldn't really do it without
duplicating what the URI is - a unique identifier, right?

on an ever so slightly more serious note, it seems to my humble self that
a mechanism (i almost wrote 'standard') for namespace registries (for the
URI part, not the prefix!) could be very useful indeed. say to locate the
schema or wsdl that defines a document you're trying to read, or service
you're trying to talk to.
at the moment you can try to dereference the URI in the hope that it's not
just a namespace but also a URL to the resource, but rarely will that give
you anything but a 404. and it shouldn't really, anyhow.
but the server part of a namespace could be used to send a request to
resolve or get a list of resources. say if there was a convention and a
protocol for this sort of lookups, using maybe RDDL and a composit URL
like /GiveMeResolution, i know to ask for tagbox.org WSDL files at
http://www.tagbox.org/GiveMeResolution
or something. and if i, as a service provider, were serious about the
namespaces i define and publish, i'd make sure to have a service running
to answer those requests.

sorry for the lack of direction here, my point is simply -
registry good, centralisation not necessary

/m

Martin Klang
http://www.o-xml.org - the object-oriented XML programming language

• References:
  • RE: Registered Namespace prefixes
    • From: Jeff Lowery <Jeff.Lowery@c...>

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