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RE: simple question on namespaces.

• From: Mike.Champion@S...
• To: xml-dev@l...
• Date: Fri, 29 Dec 2000 14:27:05 -0500

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Martin Gudgin [mailto:marting@d...]
> Sent: Friday, December 29, 2000 12:51 PM
> To: Jonathan Borden; Paul Tchistopolskii; xml-dev@l...
> Subject: Re: simple question on namespaces.

> Does anyone else get irritated that the rest of the world
> seems to think
> that 4 and 5 are the same? I see lots and lots of advertisements in
> magazines and on television that have 'URLs' of the form
> www.ourwebsite.com
> with no preceding 'http://'.

For that matter, IE5 will happilly fill in the "www" and the ".com" as well as the "http://" (and the implied "port 80" and file "index.htm" of course). It's probably only a matter of time before advertisements just point to "ourwebsite". (Try typing just "amazon" or "cnn" into the address line in a browser and see what happens).

While I understand why people who know how a URL is formally defined would be irritated by the ambiguity this can produce, *some* defaults and abbreviations are necessary. To stretch the point, you wouldn't REALLY want to have to type (or say, or print)

"hypertexttransportprotocol://worldwidewebserver.ourwebsite.commercedomain:80/defaultpage.hypertextmarkuplanguage" would you? 

I suspect it's thousands of years too late to try to "educate" people on the value of complete and explicit identifiers; human language and cognition seems to have a built-in appreciation for abbreviation and defaulting.  Of course, computers have a built-in appreciation for literalism and explicitness ... which is why the Semantic Web will be such a challenge to produce.

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