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Re: Registered namespace prefixes

• To: XML DEV <xml-dev@l...>
• Subject: Re: Registered namespace prefixes
• From: "W. E. Perry" <wperry@f...>
• Date: Sat, 08 Mar 2003 14:08:28 -0500
• Organization: Fiduciary Automation
• References: <r01050400-1024-27D4DBB1517B11D78E560003937A08C2@[192.168.124.11]>

"Simon St.Laurent" wrote:

> elharo@m... (Elliotte Rusty Harold) writes:
> >In other words, it's useful for elements to have identifiers for
> >their class as well as their own nature, a genera as well as a
> >species. Very few people talk about this, but it is far and away the
> >most important use of namespaces.
>
> Looking at my SAX code and my XSLT stylesheets, this is definitely how I
> use namespaces in practice.  I worry about versioning genera, but we'll
> see how that works over the next few years.

I think that Elliotte is exactly right about the usefulness and importance
of an Aristotelian taxonomy for XML names, but Simon rightly points out one
of the areas (versioning) where the taxonomy permitted by Namespaces in XML
is inadequate. With apologies for returning this thread to where it was ten
days ago (http://lists.xml.org/archives/xml-dev/200302/msg01168.html), the
nature of XML documents requires a taxonomy built on the provenance and
structure in which XML names are found. These are the two axes which
determine the name *spaces* in XML. The provenance of a document in which an
XML name occurs is accurately located with reference to the internetwork
topology; within that document each occurrence of a name is accurately
located with respect to the document structure. An XML vocabulary is the
corpus of occurrences of a set of names, as identified within that taxonomy.
The semantics of an XML vocabulary are catalogued by the processes which,
based upon the taxonomy of provenance and structure, have been executed
against particular XML names, and on the outcomes of those processes.

Respectfully,

Walter Perry

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    • From: "Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@s...>

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