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RE: Registered Namespace prefixes

• To: "'Emmanuil Batsis (Manos)'" <mbatsis@n...>, Jeff Lowery <Jeff.Lowery@c...>, xml-dev <xml-dev@l...>
• Subject: RE: Registered Namespace prefixes
• From: Jeff Lowery <Jeff.Lowery@c...>
• Date: Wed, 26 Feb 2003 13:14:54 -0800

> From: Emmanuil 

> Sorry, for being negative in this post, but I'm sure that many 
> (including me) are against any form of central registries.

I expected negativity.  The flames keep me toasty warm.

> But even beyond that, the word registry (central or not - a 
> distributed 
> registry is achievable)- means more request>response lag. 

Nope.  You don't need to look up the prefix in a registry.  The prefix is
just a short namespace identifier, one which can be assigned a semantic
meaning, but that's up to whoever registered the prefix.

> This 
> complicates the design further as a large part of use-cases 
> will demand 
> a local mirror of the registry.

Nope, again.   Iff you want to attach semantics, then some mirror may be
needed.  There are plenty of cases already where a namespace id is a real
URI to a real resource on the web.  But it doesn't mean anybody's actually
looking at it.

> People tired of typing URIs use entities (a common thing among RDF 
> people). Do we want prefixes to break out of the document scope?

Nothing is breaking out of the document scope, except the authority to
create a prefix designated as 'registered'.  Provisional prefixes could use
the same namepaces in xml mechanisms as they exist now, but I confess that I
haven't thought through how you'd mix provisional and registred namespaces
in the same document.  One could designate a different separator character
for registered prefixes, but the one good one has already been taken.  

> 
> In general I agree that a new namespaces mechanism would be a 
> good thing 
> (if designed utilising community feedback) but the problem is 
> very much 
> connected with the (miss) use of URIs in general. The current 
> situation 
> is just a pot where URIs as vocabularies, namespaces, locators and 
> identifiers boil all together. Different people have different views 
> about what the dish will taste like.

Notice that I said that a URI is optional for a registered prefix!

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