xml-dev - Re: Irony heaped on irony

[David Megginson <david@megginson.com>]

"Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@simonstl.com> writes:

> >I could move the schema, but that would break lots of _other_
> >schemas, including the schema for schemas, which depend on it.
> >
> >Seems to me having something of mime type text/xml at the namespace
> >URI for XML is not something we should have to apologise for.
> 
> But it does seem that such a sweeping change in namespaces best practices
> is worth an explanation or preferably a full-blown trip through the W3C
> process, complete with working drafts.

Tim and Simon are right.  

I will freely admit to not being aware of all of the minutiae of XML
Schemas, but Henry's approach seems dead-on wrong to me.  The schema
for schemas (and others) should reference an XML schema for the xml:
Namespace using the xsi:schemaLocation attribute, as in

  xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.w3.org/XML/1998/namespace
                      http://www.w3.org/XML/Schemas/xmlschema-20000518.xsd"

Please remove the schema from http://www.w3.org/XML/1998/namespace and 
put it somewhere else, then update the schema for schemas to follow
this (better) practice.  This also has the advantage that users can
refer to the specific version of the xml: schema that they want to use.

> We've spent over a year on XML-Dev and elsewhere explaining to the
> world that Namespace URIs are just identifiers, battled over the
> three/one namespaces for XHTML issue, and now it seems that
> namespaces are indeed supposed to point to schemas.  (And packaging?
> Is that gone?)

I think that the XML Schema WG got it right with the
xsi:schemaLocation attribute, and I'm puzzled that they've failed to
follow their own recommendation (that's small-r "recommendation", not
"Recommendation").


All the best,


David

-- 
David Megginson                 david@megginson.com
           http://www.megginson.com/

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