[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: Another look at namespaces
Tim Berners-Lee writes: > That is not useful. I realize that the word "Namespace" (as the > end result fo the discussions of modules or docuemnt types or > vocabularies or...) may be an english word which does not convey > this, but a a namespaces is a language: a set of names plus a set > of syntactic constraints plus - to be useful - a meaning shared by > writer and recipient. As (I think) Tim is arguing later in his message, a Namespace is a component of a vocabulary: specifically, it's the mechanism that XML documents use to represent (and disambiguate) the names that are part of a vocabulary, but, as Rick argues, it's not the vocabulary itself. Since Paul Prescod mentioned Chomsky, I'll mention Saussure: like written or spoken words, a namespace-qualified name is a pure <foreign lang="fr">signifiant</foreign> without any <foreign lang="fr">signifiée</foreign>. For example, the signifier "{http://www.megginson.com/ns/}apt" can be represented by Namespaces. The signified (say, "a valid ICAO airport code") cannot be represented by Namespaces, but for now will probably be represented in human-readable documentation and hard-coded in applications. I guess that a machine-readable schema could constrain the element to contain up to four alphanumeric characters, but who cares, really? My application still has to know somehow that it's an airport code and it has to know what it wants to do with airport codes (sell you a ticket? give you driving directions? tell you that the document contains a match for the code you were looking for?). All the best, David -- David Megginson david@m... http://www.megginson.com/ 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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