xml-dev - Why doesn't this solve this namepaces problem? (was Re: Thats me withmy

[Rick Jelliffe <ricko@allette.com.au>]

From: Uche Ogbuji <uche.ogbuji@fourthought.com>

> Rick Jelliffe says let's cave and allow NSRef == schema.

No, what I am saying is this:  I (and others, such as Tim Bray, Noah
Mendelson and Simon StL) have long been saying namespace!=schema and that
W3C needs complete the Namespaces spec with a suitable related-resource
discovery language.  There should be a single W3C-family way to do this.

Where I am moderating my position is in the case where the data provider
only has a single resource available. Perhaps you only have an HTML
document, or a Schematron Schema, or an RDF Schema or an XML Schema, or
RELAX.  In that case, the related-resource document is a null layer  (and
therefore undesirable for the WWW) : it just redirects to a single resource.

So in that case, I think simplicity and efficiency both dictate that the
null layer be omitted, and the ultimate single resource be directly
retrieved from the namespace name.

So namespace!=schema. Instead, the namespace resource is always a directory
of related resources, but if dereferencing a namespace URIref returns a
document that is not a directory of related resources then the directory of
related resources can (i.e. must) be *implied*, with no violence to the
conceptual model.

I think this provides the only way out for us. It is simple, clear,
definite, extensible, allow plurality,  and removes a roadblock to the
semantic web.  It also gives us an alternative for use in SOAP, where they
want to have namespace=schema.

Cheers
Rick Jelliffe