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At 08:26 PM 8/29/99 -0400, Ed Nixon wrote: >However, what I haven't seen 'mongst the sound and fury is anything from Ann >or anyone else regarding the 'persuasive arguments' she mentions in support >of the multi-namespace approach. I hope there are no constraints in her >sharing them with us. Well, I tend to err on the side of caution there, in that much of the argument occured within the scope of WG meetings. Paul Prescod has rightly pointed out that we need a Namespaces Evolution process. We don't have one, yet people are forced to try and forsee how that might be managed, and sort of eek out one of their own. My interpretation of W3C management stance is that namespaces can indeed be bound to schemas. (Based on comments directly from Tim Berners-Lee and others) Logically, this makes sense. It gives us something to do with it. It answers the argument that there is no "there" there in namespaces. (A very common response and frustration to using them). Consider the English alphabet. We know, as an abstract concept, that this is the letters a through z. We can call it the English Alphabet Namepsace, and give it a URI over at Merriam-Webster or something. Great, that's nice and abstract. Yes, it can help prevent naming collisions, but it doesn't allow you to learn anything at all about them (other than the URI that represents it's namespace, which in and of itself is rather useless). Doesn't at all prevent them from writing a document that says "The English Alphabet contains the following characters (case insensitive): a, b, c, d........z" and slapping it up at the URI provided for that namespace. An application could try to visit that URL and find that definition doc. Yes, we know that the namespaces rec says there is no expectation that something will be there. But heck, it can try. And what do you know, it finds something. Hey great, I have a machine readable version of that abstract collection. My machine might actually be able to do something with it now other than prevent naming collisions. Sounds great to me. Apologies to anyone who may be offended by my seemingly flippant attitude toward this, but practical applications do it for me, where abstraction often is simply a fun academic exercise. Ann (call me a Namespace Heretic) Navarro --- Author of Effective Web Design: Master the Essentials Coming in September --- Mastering XML Founder, WebGeek Communications http://www.webgeek.com Vice President-Finance, HTML Writers Guild http://www.hwg.org Director, HWG Online Education http://www.hwg.org/services/classes xml-dev: A list for W3C XML Developers. To post, mailto:xml-dev@i... Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/xml-dev/ and on CD-ROM/ISBN 981-02-3594-1 To (un)subscribe, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; (un)subscribe xml-dev To subscribe to the digests, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; subscribe xml-dev-digest List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa@i...)
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