[
Lists Home |
Date Index |
Thread Index
]
- From: Terry Allen <tallen@sonic.net>
- To: xml-dev@ic.ac.uk
- Date: Sat, 16 Jan 1999 18:35:34 -0800
Tim Bray wrote, in two messages:
| At 01:24 PM 1/15/99 -0500, Roger L. Costello wrote:
| > It seems that people have
| >differing ideas on what it is. I would like to try to summarize the points
| >of view, and add my own two cents.
| >
| >(1) A namespace is just a URI. It references some domain. It is simply
| >there to tell an application/processor what domain the associated XML
| >elements hail from.
|
| This is the "view" that is expressed by the actual namespace spec. Other
| views are simply incorrect. There is not one word in the namespace spec
| that suggests that namespace URIs represent DTDs, and in fact specific
| language (look it up) that says that it's a non-goal that the URI
| actually points at anything.
...
| At 02:42 PM 1/16/99 -0500, Borden, Jonathan wrote:
| >The
| >question is whether a namespace has meaning outside of the name, or what
| >meaning does the namespace uri have?
|
| No meaning. It's just a name.
|
| >
| > some people suggest it is just a unique name. others suggest it
| >ought to
| >point to a DTD, and others a schema. this issue is still under debate
|
| There are lots of interesting potential uses of the namespace URI. None
| of them are either blessed or forbidden by the namespace spec. For now,
| it's a name and that's all it is.
Now, RFC 2396 says (from the Abstract):
A Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) is a compact string of characters
for identifying an abstract or physical resource. This document
and (from section 1.1):
Resource
A resource can be anything that has identity. Familiar
examples include an electronic document, an image, a service
(e.g., "today's weather report for Los Angeles"), and a
collection of other resources. Not all resources are network
"retrievable"; e.g., human beings, corporations, and bound
books in a library can also be considered resources.
So the "namespace" URI must identify a resource, which is anything
[any "thing"] that has identity. (Obviously and tautologically,
the identity of any thing is itself; the thing makes its own identity
simply by existing.) You say that it doesn't have to point to anything
[any "thing"], and that it's "just a name". So is the resource
["thing"] identified by a "namespace" URI itself? or is it the name
of itself (maybe Kant could explain)? How does something that is only
itself or the name of itself encompass anything else?
Me, myself, I think this is a bogus use of URIs. What you are
really using is DNS, and you don't need to use fake URIs to do so;
cf. the IOTP spec.
Terry Allen Veo Systems, Inc.
Business Language Designer 2440 W. El Camino Real
tallen[at]sonic.net Mountain View, Calif., 94040
Common Business Library - available at http://www.veosystems.com/
xml-dev: A list for W3C XML Developers. To post, mailto:xml-dev@ic.ac.uk
Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/xml-dev/
To (un)subscribe, mailto:majordomo@ic.ac.uk the following message;
(un)subscribe xml-dev
To subscribe to the digests, mailto:majordomo@ic.ac.uk the following message;
subscribe xml-dev-digest
List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa@ic.ac.uk)
|