xml-dev - Bring back src? (was Re: simple question on namespaces.)

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

At 06:50 PM 12/28/00 -0500, Arjun Ray cited:
>| I do not expect that a namespaces NSDef can be dereferenced to
>| obtain a schema.  If a schema is associated with a namespace, 
>| there will need to be some new mechanism invented for the 
>| association: SRC was dropped.  The immediate use I see namespaces
>| put to is recognition:  Programs can test names to see whether 
>| they match a specific namespace and local name, thereby
>| distinguishing names that would be otherwise conflictingly
>| ambiguous.  [...] I definitely expect that many namespaces will 
>| have associated schemas, and that this will be important.  I do 
>| not, however, think that a namespace and an associated schema are
>| identical.

Maybe we could finally break the cycle of namespace violence by
re-examining the decision to drop the src pseudo-attribute, which appears
to have happened between the 18-May-1998 draft of Namespaces in XML
(http://www.w3.org/TR/1998/WD-xml-names-19980518) and the 16-September-1998
draft (http://www.w3.org/TR/1998/WD-xml-names-19980916).

It seems that we have a problem involving overloading an identifier with
behavior, and that separating the behavior from the identifier might
plausibly let us get on with our real work rather than debating the nature
of identifiers.

Perhaps something like xmlnssrc:prefix="retrievable SRC URI"?

Not all namespaces would have to have it, but not all namespaces are
intended for retrieval anyway.  It'd give us a much clearer line of
demarcation as well.

Then we could fight about what lived at the end of SRC, but we're doing
that anyway.

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