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

["Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@simonstl.com>]

At 01:52 PM 10/24/00 +0800, Rick JELLIFFE wrote:
>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.

That was, in fact, exactly what I was getting at. (See list item 1 of the
10:03 AM message where I quote Henry Thompson's "Content Negotiation!")

I'm not sure I can approve entirely of the 'just add .xsd' approach, since
filename extensions aren't the most stable or non-conflicting critters in
the world.  I suspect the ietf-mime-xml list would be rolling their
eyeballs at extension-based conventions like that.

Content negotiation could offer an 80/20 solution - but it needs to be
documented, discussed, and sorted out.  The relationship of namespaces to
resources with content of various different MIME Content Types isn't
exactly a small thing, and content negotiation in general is pretty weakly
implemented so far.  Organizationally, this is at the boundaries between
the W3C and the IETF, and philosophically, it brings us back into the
philosophical murk of 'what is a namespace anyway?'

Seems to me like it's worth discussion in broad daylight rather than
implementation by night.

(But maybe that's just the radio transmitters in my teeth talking - who
knows?)

Simon St.Laurent
XML Elements of Style / XML: A Primer, 2nd Ed.
XHTML: Migrating Toward XML
http://www.simonstl.com - XML essays and books