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RE: Choosing when to namespace (was Re: Vocabulary Combination

• To: "'Seairth Jacobs'" <seairth@s...>, xml-dev@l...
• Subject: RE: Choosing when to namespace (was Re: Vocabulary Combination)
• From: "Hunsberger, Peter" <Peter.Hunsberger@s...>
• Date: Thu, 29 May 2003 13:35:36 -0500

Seairth Jacobs <seairth@s...> wrote:
> 
> From: "Hunsberger, Peter" <Peter.Hunsberger@s...>
> >
> > All of which is a long winded way of arriving at the 
> conclusion that: 
> > you don't need namespaces if you precisely understand the 
> context of 
> > the combined vocabularies, but until you combine the 
> vocabularies you 
> > probably want the name spaces if only to help in combining the 
> > vocabularies.
> 
> I have been working on a new vocabulary (RNA) [1].  The 
> specification allows additional vocabularies (Vocabulary A) 
> to be combined, as long as the following limitations are met:
> 
> 1) The document must always be of RNA, but may contain 
> Vocabulary A.  In other words, RNA cannot be used inside of a 
> document of Vocabulary A.
> 2) Vocabulary A elements and attributes must always be 
> namespace-qualified.
> 
> As a result, RNA is never namespace-qualified.  In an earlier 
> incarnation of the spec, I had placed RNA within a namespace 
> since I knew there was potential for combination with other 
> vocabularies.  In some conversations on namespaces, it was 
> pointed out to me that this wasn't necessary given the above 
> limitations and that keeping namespaces out allowed for 
> easier processing of the document using standard tools.  This 
> made sense to me, so I removed the namespace stuff (with the 
> exception of "extensions" [2]). Now, this vocabulary has no 
> namespace but has specific rules for namespaced vocabularies 
> to be used with it.
> 
> It seems to me that this is the correct way to go about 
> handling namespaces, at least in this case.

The assumption that RNA cannot be used inside of some other vocabulary seems
perhaps dangerous to me: on person's metadata is another persons data.
Sooner or later someone will want to gobble up RNA and encapsulate it in
some strange way. Perhaps if only to present a live RNA example on a Web
page?  Sure, in that case you can probably arrange for no collisions, but
maybe someone will find a reason to do some kind of indirect/dynamic or
recursive RNA (ack!) type thing and then what?

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