[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] RE: Announce: XML Schema, The W3C's Object-Oriented Des cripti
You are right. What does a person do with the phrase: kiss my grits. Depends on the person. What does a computer do with the phrase: kiss my grits. Depends on who programmed the computer. It always depends on the person. Ya gotta choose. The problem is, that is not blind interoperability. The best we can do is try to know when we can be blind and when we need inspection to make a choice. For that, we end up with a hierarchy or distribution of authority who choose our choices. It is better if decentralized and that is the URI is there to provide. But that means a URI can't designate the same thing every time. It can point off to an index of things from which another process can choose. Thus, RDDL and XML catalogs. If we deny the semantic of the namespace, we have said it isn't interpretable and so the "preferred reading" has to be known a priori. This leads to the dominant vendor. If we say the semantic of the namespace is interpretable, we may or may not also want to provide a means for a local to interpret it. This leads to dereferencing and then it is useful to have a common mean or means to point to the currently known choices. This leads to RDDL and XML catalogs. If we say we are agnostic about this issue, (URIs are just unique strings), we leave a hole and create a mess of unreliable expectation. "The barnyard gate is as wide as the pasture" to quote myself. Mutation will not often produce a survival trait. Interspeciation and recombination can. For that to work, you need a system to recognize close types (versions). All you really need to know is if a URI identifies a type or a set of closely related types. For that, http + RDDL | catalog is ideal. Both expectation and choice are accomodated and the author can choose the chooser of their choices, including themselves. It is the expression or denotation of choice that counts. Blind dates don't always get the job done. len From: Mark Feblowitz [mailto:mfeblowitz@f...] The problem, I guess, goes way past "how should I label my dialect" and encompasses "how can my various parties adapt to unavoidable changes in dialect?" And, oh, yeah - can namespace help with all of that?
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