xml-dev - Re: Schema at XML namespace URI to change

[Rick JELLIFFE <ricko@geotempo.com>]

Tim Bray wrote:
>  
> Anyhow, I think that Rick is right, that an 80/20 solution here,
> file extension and/or content-negotiation, is perfectly OK for
> the short term and might turn out to be embarrassingly OK in the
> long term, just like that other famous 80/20 solution, the WWW. -T

The file extension addresses the issue of multiple resources. The
content negotiation addresses the issue of different alternate
representations of a single resource.  The permanant URLs versus the
single namespace one addresses versioning issues and genericity.

But content negotiation was not designed to get different forms of
things that are different: for example that we can request from the
Namespace url   application/rdf-schema+xml  and text/xml-dtd  and 
application/css

This would be a quite novel use of content negotiation that should raise
a lot of questions. If this is what Simon was getting at, then he is
right that this is not within the Schema WGs perview to change content
negotiation like this.  

But perhaps this is something where it would be useful to broaden the
scope of content negotiation, so that it can perform retrieval of
different kinds of resources from namespace URI Refs.  I don't like it,
myself.  Just adding a well-known extension to the URI seems a much
better approach.

Rick Jelliffe