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- From: Tim Bray <tbray@textuality.com>
- To: xml-dev <xml-dev@ic.ac.uk>
- Date: Thu, 06 Jan 2000 12:14:29 -0800
At 02:51 PM 1/6/00 -0500, Bob Kline wrote:
>> Basically, then, the main question was whether the attribute names in
>> the following two examples are identical:
>> <html:a href="foo">
>> <html:a html:href="foo">
>> For most applications (such as RDF, and, possibly, XSL), the answer is
>> a firm 'no', but the WG decided to make it *possible* to distinguish
>I'm feeling a little lost in the medieval subtleties here.
It's a pity this stuff is so hard, but well... it's hard. One of the
brightest computer programmers I ever knew, Phil Karlton, said "There
are only two hard problems in Computer Science: cache invalidation
and naming things." I agree that it's hard to avoid discussions that
are reminiscent of medieval theology.
So... let's try again. Consider these two
<html:a href="foo">
<html:a html:href="foo">
The namespace spec could have said one of three things:
1. These must always be treated as identical
2. These must always be treated as different
3. Applications can make up their minds
The then-Working Group eventually went for #3. It's kind of like
non-Euclidean geometries; each of the three options above produces a
self-consistent universe, so the only question is, which one do we
want to live in?
Most applications, it seems, want to live in Universe #1, and the
namespace spec allows them to do that. -Tim
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