[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] RE: RDDL (was RE: Negotiate Out The Noise)
Paul, I've just spent some time working back through your posts, and the previous discussion to attempt to understand where the disagreements are. It seems that the fundamental point of disagreement is that you're asking "what is RDDL for?, what problems does it solve?, what applications does it let me build more easily?". And in particular you're considering it's applicability to distributed applications where some negotiation is required (cf: Lens original thread). You've asserted that the origins of RDDL are political and not technical in nature and that any suggestions as to how RDDL might be used in that context are purely scientific. In effect that RDDL is a solution to a political problem ("Whats at the end of a Namespace?"), and is being used to propose technical solutions in other scenarios. Here I disagree. RDDL is a solution to a problem that you helped identify, and which Mike Champion dubbed the 'Tool X Horror Scenario' [1]. In your opinion the loophole that would allow NS URIs to be abused should be closed. You also argued that it would take 'years' to identify what should be put there if anything. Others believed letting it point to a directory of resources would meet everyones needs. I don't see any politics involved, just a different opinion on the best way to avoid the Horror Scenario. We can reasonably disagree over whether you see this as a political issue. I see RDDL (or an alternative) as more of an interoperability spec, that would avoid the creation of ad hoc solutions. As you disagree that this is a useful problem to solve, it's not surprising you don't see any value in RDDL. You've also stated that some of us, myself included, have been misleading developers by telling them that there's nothing at the end of a NS URI, but then turning round and telling them to use RDDL. I still believe the former to be the letter of the spec, but believe the latter is required for the above reasons. Any claim of 'spy vs spy' is a little insulting. You've agreed that something *like* RDDL (a way of discovering resources) *is* required. But have raised issues about caching, certification, etc. There's no disputing that. But this seems to have more to do with the resources themselves ("How do I know this Java class isn't going to damage my system?") than the directory format. Note that it's also previously been pointed out that RDDL docs could be cached locally if one deferences the URI via a Catalog. As far as concrete feedback on RDDL goes, I see you've made the following points: - rddl:resource and anchors have redundancy, you'd prefer something like annotations on the anchor directly. Your rddl-hook attribute. - that defining something called 'purpose' with an attribute called 'arcrole' is confusing. I'm not sure I really do understand your other claims about how RDDL interacts with Namespaces. I have a feeling that your saying that a single general purpose schema for a namespace isn't useful for circumstances where those elements may be mixed freely with others from other Namespaces. If so I agree, but I don't see what RDDL has to do with this. To me it suggests that elements intended to be used in this way should not used closed schemas. This is one of the reasons I like Schematron so much. Cheers, L. [1]. http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2001/01/10/rddl.html [2]. http://lists.xml.org/archives/xml-dev/200012/msg00662.html
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