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Re: Registered Namespace prefixes

• To: XML Dev <xml-dev@l...>
• Subject: Re: Registered Namespace prefixes
• From: Gavin Thomas Nicol <gtn@r...>
• Date: Thu, 6 Mar 2003 12:57:49 -0500
• In-reply-to: <4827EC373E03DB44AC2AB3900430896B02661F@w...>
• Organization: Red Bridge Interactive, Inc.
• References: <4827EC373E03DB44AC2AB3900430896B02661F@w...>
• User-agent: KMail/1.4.3

On Thursday 06 March 2003 12:40 pm, Jeff Lowery wrote:
> > without a significant change in programming models, 
> > local context, and local interpretation is *all* you have.
>
> Urgh.  I don't understand why you say this.  I do agree that the registry
> would be overhead (though less than you would think, see below), but I
> don't know how one could assign ownership of a nonconflicting,
> short-sequence namespace identifier through any other mechanism than a
> registry.

My question is: why do you need to? I always hear that rationale that "we need 
to mix and match arbitrary tag sets", but that only matters if you do it 
blindly, and somehow have a magical dispatch table keyed off the prefix or 
the URI. That's generally not the case, and generally not open-ended even if 
it exists (though you *could* do it using a registry).

If that's not true, you will have some form of convention/agreement in place 
that let's you know what to expect.... you'll know what a name:space is, and 
an html:p. In that case, the registry is largely superfluous, because if you 
and I have a convention to use foo: prefixes in our data interchange, why 
should we care if some other party uses it? If we expect to deal with their 
data at some point, we might, but we might at that point also negotiate the 
use of a different prefix.

For vocabularies that people *do* care enough about to standardize, there are 
already registration vehicles in place.

> Just to hammer this nail one more time: there's no need to 'consult' the
> registry.

OK. This was a bit of a misunderstanding. Your registry is really just for 
humans to use? That might help people who write standards.

• References:
  • RE: Registered Namespace prefixes
    • From: Jeff Lowery <Jeff.Lowery@c...>

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