xml-dev - What should a namespace URI point to?

[Tim Bray <tbray@textuality.com>]

I think that if you got a group of qualified people, mostly
computer programmers, together, you could cook, in a few 
weeks, cook up a nice little markup vocabulary containing:

1. a few basic chunks of XHTML 
2. the simple XLink element (I don't think you need extended, and 
   by using simple you could graft the whole thing onto an XHTML
   <div> or some such).
3. a namespace in which are defined a bunch of reserved 
   role attribute values

These things would look like web pages and would display
nicely in a browser.  The idea is that the xlinks would
point to related resources of various types.  The role
namespace would contain precooked values for various
kinds of related resources (e.g. css stylesheet, xsd
schema, dtd) whose use is widespread enough to achieve
some consensus.  Obviously, you could have links to 
more than one dtd or xsd or whatever.

I think this would be the ideal kind of thing to retrieve
when you dereference a namespace URI.  Readable by humans
and also machine-processable and fully extensible.

If I were feeling particularly grandiose, I'd also describe
such a thing as a key building block for the Semantic Web.

But it would have to be done low, fast, and under the radar...
 -Tim