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- From: "Carl Hage" <carl@chage.com>
- To: xml-dev@ic.ac.uk
- Date: Mon, 31 May 1999 10:04:23 -0800
From: "Jonathan Borden" <jborden@mediaone.net>
> Paul Hunter wrote:
> > Using HTTP for URIs sounds intrinsically <em>bad</em> to me. ...
...
> No one has offered a hard or
> practical example of an actual problem this creates, aside from offending
> of the sensibilities.
Turn it around-- it would be intrinsically <em>good</em> to require
all namespaces to reference a retrievable document. Any existing
namespace registry can be mapped into a backwards compatible
HTTP URL, returning something, e.g. http://isbn.org/isbn/1-57595-
180-0B could return the USMARC data (card catalog) formatted in
HTML with a link to an XML representation. It serves as a URI as
well as a source of documentation.
Software that maps hytime namespaces can just as easily map
http://hytime.org/ namespaces, and software that knows nothing of
hytime namespaces could follow a URL to find needed info. (Maybe
manually, but better than nothing.)
I think the URI identifying namespaces and DTDs should be URLs
not URNs. An XML document without retrievable documentation on
the DTD should be considered non-compliant. The biggest problem
isn't syntax-- it's the semantics. XML validators based on DTDs will
only identify an insignificant percentage of errors-- hardly worth it if
you ask me unless debugging software. (Though considering how
Microsoft and Netscape callously violate HTML standards, I may
need to recant.)
Likewise, a DTD->HTML converter doesn't produce human readable
documentation, because the most important part (semantics) is
missing.
If you ask me, XML will really work only when XML-Schema (or
whatever) is enhanced to include human-readable detailed
documentation (with all code-values defined in an XML thesaurus),
and the URIs in XML/DTD headers lead to a retreivable version of
this. Putting the semantics and code-value definitions in separate
paper documents (the norm today) must be abandoned. Instead
everything needed should be accessable at the other end of the
namespace URL.
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