Re: Resource Gloss (Human Readable)

[Tim Bray <tbray@textuality.com>]

At 04:10 AM 04/01/01 +0800, Rick Jelliffe wrote:
>   I completely disagree that there should be any
>expectation of human-readable documentation an http: Namespace URI ref.
>What should be retrievable should be up to the discretion of the information
>provider as long as it can be fitted into a general conceptual framework.
>Even XML Schemas will sometimes be downloaded (e.g. to supply attribute
>defaults),  so to force an extra indirection imposes too much.

Well, we completely disagree.  I see the namespaces of the world as 
divided into two classes; those I already know about, and those I
don't know about yet.  For the ones I konw about, I can see an RDDL
being helpful mostly for looking up what-was-the-URL-of-that-damn-CSS
again or some such, and can see some machine processing being useful
here, to check (occasionally) that my schema is up to date or whatever.
But for these namespaces, in most cases my software will know what to do.

For the ones that I *don't* know about, the crucial thing is 
human-readable documentation.  And it's in this context that it
seems I'm most likely going to dereference a namespace URI.

Closing comment: I'm back at work on my real job now that the
vacation is over, so Jonathan is more or less on his own with
RDDL unless someone else wants to pitch in with maintaining it. -Tim