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

["Clark C. Evans" <cce@clarkevans.com>]

Nice.  A human *and* machine readable catalogue as a
mixture of XHTML, XLink, etc.  What are we waiting for?

On Sat, 30 Dec 2000, Tim Bray wrote:
> 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...

Proposed and talked about on this list isn't necessarly
under the radar ... although it could be done quickly. 

;) Clark