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Re: more QName madness

• To: jenglish@f... (Joe English)
• Subject: Re: more QName madness
• From: John Cowan <jcowan@r...>
• Date: Tue, 19 Nov 2002 07:17:24 -0500 (EST)
• Cc: xml-dev@l...
• In-reply-to: <200211190105.gAJ15q305050@d...> from "Joe English" at Nov 18, 2002 05:05:52 PM

Joe English scripsit:

> Sarcasm aside, I could devise one.  So could you, and so could any of
> the individual members of the Linking WG.  Not trivially easy,
> but a good deal simpler than the proposed framework and with
> most of the expressive power.

No sarcasm intended.  I would be most interested in such a proposal
or even a sketch.

> I suspect you would have, too,
> if it weren't for the half-dozen other W3C WGs plus the TAG
> applying pressure to add features and do things the "W3C Way".

AFAIK this is not true.  Though I have not been on the Linking WG
very long, I have been monitoring it almost since the beginning -- a
loooong time ago in Internet years -- and it seems to have been evolving
quite organically and pretty much self-directed, too.

> The XPointer family of PRs look to me like a clear victim of
> scope creep.  They have left the 80/20 neighborhood and are well
> into 5-95 territory -- that last 5% of the functionality that
> takes 95% of the effort.

Personally, I think the xpointer() scheme is over that line, but the
rest are not.

> But if I'm mistaken and multiple schemes are an inescapable
> necessity, an open system just makes matters worse.  Henry S.
> Thompson cites the interop nightmare caused by potential scheme
> name collisions as the reason for using URIs to identify them.
> I suspect that this will be an even worse interop nightmare.
> How will implementors know which schemes to implement, and how will
> users know which schemes are safe to use, if new XPointer schemes
> can pop into existence on the Semantic Web at any time?

It's a quality of implementation issue and/or a standards issue.
Specify which schemes you are going to use and then use them.
(Remember that, as discussed earlier, the Linking WG does *not*
prescribe the forms usable in the fragment identifiers of application/xml
and its friends.)

> But if I'm wrong on that count too and (1) an open system is
> required and (2) there can be no new central registry, there's
> always the NIST identifier collaboration service:
> 
>     <URL: http://ats.nist.gov/nics/ >

I'll look into this.

-- 
Said Agatha Christie / To E. Philips Oppenheim  John Cowan
"Who is this Hemingway? / Who is this Proust?   jcowan@r...
Who is this Vladimir / Whatchamacallum,         http://www.reutershealth.com
This neopostrealist / Rabble?" she groused.     http://www.ccil.org/cowan
        --author unknown to me; any suggestions?

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