using namespaces to version

[Warren Hedley <w.hedley@auckland.ac.nz>]

Hi folks,

I'm wondering if anyone on the list has any strong opinions about
the use of namespaces for versioning. In particular, am I likely
to run into any problems if I base my namespaces on the Dublin Core
format shown below?

I quite like the Dublin Core namespaces proposed in the various
Dublin Core in XML proposals at http://dublincore.org/. These have
the form:

http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.0/
http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/
http://purl.org/dc/qualifiers/1.1/

MathML on the other hand defines one namespace and no facility for
versioning (as far as I know). So a MathML 1.0 processor has no way
of telling if a document with elements from the MathML namespace
(which is http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML ) is invalid or from a
future version of MathML (though one could argue that these are the
same thing as far as the processor is concerned).

There is a thread on this topic in the archive, although no real
conclusion or recommendation seems to have been reached. The link is
http://lists.xml.org/archives/xml-dev/200008/msg00612.html . If
anyone knows of other threads in the archive that might be relevant,
could they bring them to my attention?

Thanks,
Warren Hedley

-- 
Warren Hedley
The Bioengineering Research Group
The University of Auckland
New Zealand