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John Aldridge wrote: > At 08:48 26/05/00 +0100, David Brownell wrote: > >The "XML Namespaces" specification is quite clear that the > >purpose of a namespace "Universal Resource IDENTIFIER" is > >identification, not location. > > But this whole debate is not about what "XML Namespaces" says (that's > largely uncontentious), but about whether it should be amended to say > something else. > > I think that TimBL and DanC believe that a common (if not the only) > mechanism for finding metadata about a namespace will be to dereference the > namespace URI. (If I'm misrepresenting them, I'm sorry, and I hope they'll > clarify their position). > > Others on this list (including myself) disagree. > > These two positions place rather different requirements on the behaviour of > the namespace URI. Specifically, they lead to opposite conclusions on > whether the NSURI should be absolutised before comparison. I originally felt very strongly that the position you describe as that of TimBL and DanC was the right one, perhaps because I found it incredible that the behavior would be anything else. I still feel it's essential to have some standardized way of associating metadata with namespaces. But the discussion has shown there's another way to do that: create new attributes for that purpose. [Side note: the specification of such attributes could be tricky, because attributes are normally treated as a set, not a sequence. The xmlns-metadata attribute would have to specify both the namespace prefix and the URI for the metadata (and maybe its intended interpretation also). Ordinarily a single attribute specifies a single property. This looks to me like a difficult problem but not an insoluble one.] Paul Abrahams *************************************************************************** This is xml-dev, the mailing list for XML developers. To unsubscribe, mailto:majordomo@x...&BODY=unsubscribe%20xml-dev List archives are available at http://xml.org/archives/xml-dev/ ***************************************************************************
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