[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] RE: XHTML and the Three Namespaces
Since there have been several recent misunderstandings of my position regarding namespaces and schemas, I will attempt to short-cut speculation and spell-out explicitly what I believe to be the correct relation between the two: 1. Namespaces serve to associate universally-unique identifiers with qualified names. 2. Anything so identified can have, at most, one definition. 3. All distinctions between identified items must be reflected by a difference in the respective identifiers. 4. An item's definition might be supplied by a human-readable document, or a machine-readable one; by one document or perhaps several taken in aggregate, combined in some determinate fashion. 5. Discovery of similarity between two distinct items may require reading their respective definitions, either directly at the time of processing, or indirectly at an earlier time, and may be effected either by direct processing of the defining documents, or indirect reflection of the contents of the defining documents, for example by a human reading the document and incorporating some of its information into a program. 6. Schemas may be associated with namespaces, and may serve the role of defining the items in the namespace. 7. If a schema is associated with a namespace, there will be mechanisms for locating that schema given the namespace URI. (Note that this formulation expressly does not require that the URI of the schema is the same as the URI of the namespace.) I believe that the point of greatest misunderstanding here is the belief that point two requires conflating namespaces with schemas. (I conclude this because several of my arguments in favor of point two have met with replies arguing not directly against point two, but instead arguing that namespaces and schemas are distinct.) I understand that there are other viewpoints. This mail is not intended to argue in favor of my position, nor to argue against other positions, but to make clear statements of the several issues involved and clarify my position on each. 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...)
|
PURCHASE STYLUS STUDIO ONLINE TODAY!Purchasing Stylus Studio from our online shop is Easy, Secure and Value Priced! Download The World's Best XML IDE!Accelerate XML development with our award-winning XML IDE - Download a free trial today! Subscribe in XML format
|