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Re: more QName madness

• To: <veillard@r...>, "Henry S. Thompson" <ht@c...>
• Subject: Re: more QName madness
• From: "Jonathan Borden" <jonathan@o...>
• Date: Sat, 16 Nov 2002 10:46:35 -0500
• Cc: "John Cowan" <jcowan@r...>, "Paul Prescod" <paul@p...>, <xml-dev@l...>, "Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@s...>
• References: <20021114111803.G28903@r...><200211141651.LAA08369@m...><20021114120416.K28903@r...> <f5blm3tpvik.fsf@e...>

Henry S. Thompson wrote:

> Daniel Veillard <veillard@r...> writes:
>
> >   Well currently interop is not addressed, there is no way to get the
> > semantic of the XPointer from the namespaced scheme name.
>
> Surely that's not the point -- the point for interop is simply that
> any given application knows the names of the schemes it implements.
> Reasonable guarantees of uniqueness of scheme names, such as that
> provided by using URIs via QNames, are all that's required to prevent
> mistakes here.
>
> No-one _ever_ claimed that using QNames would mean that a
> general-purpose XPointer processor would be able to look up the scheme
> name and find some operationalisable description of scheme semantics.
>

Well that is/would be the *benefit* of describing an XPointer scheme by
QName/URI. Simon would be able to simply post a description of his XPointer
extensions on his website, and software would be able to follow his XPointer
schemes into XML documents. That would be really cool. That's also not the
problem, the problem is that the xmlns scheme is verbose and you are
requiring all of Simon's (for example) XPointers to have an xmlns scheme
part even if they are short.

Perhaps a reasonable compromise would be to both:

1) allow organizations/individuals other than the W3C to register XPointer
schemes via the IETF i.e. via the current I-D -> RFC mechanism, assuming the
IETF wished to maintain an XPointer scheme registry
2) allow individuals/organizations to use ad hoc (perhaps) XPointer schemes
via the proposed QName mechanism.

That way we can let the marketplace decide, overhead of IETF registration
process vs. overhead of xmlns scheme syntax.

*Aside* from the overhead/verbosity of the xmlns scheme syntax, the QName
scheme syntax is an excellent techical solution (IMHO).

Jonathan

http://www.jonathanborden-md.com
http://www.erieneurosurgery.com
http://www.openhealth.org

• Follow-Ups:
  • Re: more QName madness
    • From: John Cowan <jcowan@r...>

• References:
  • Re: more QName madness
    • From: Daniel Veillard <veillard@r...>
  • Re: more QName madness
    • From: John Cowan <jcowan@r...>
  • Re: more QName madness
    • From: Daniel Veillard <veillard@r...>
  • Re: more QName madness
    • From: ht@c... (Henry S. Thompson)

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