RE: Copyrighting schemas, Hailstorm (strayed a bit)

[Jeff Lowery <jlowery@scenicsoft.com>]

But John, the "why" George treats your "foo" differently from my "foo" is
the namespace; but the "how" there treated differently is dependent on the
associated semantics, which is admittedly an implicit association, not
directly indicated by the namespace but nonetheless it can be assumed that
such semantics exist for *every* namespace. There actually may be more than
one set of semantics for each namespace (conceivably) but they must be very
closely related, nonetheless.

So yes, a namespace is just a labeled set of names, but the whole point of
the namespace's existence is the semantics that are there, hidden away in
some past conversation or some associated documentation, or (partly) in some
schema somewhere. Otherwise, why would George ever bother to "treat" the
data associated with the namespaces names at all? They'd just represent
random noise.

I think we're just arguing semantics here... :-P  I'm sure there are all
sorts of pass-thru functions that couldn't care less about the semantics but
only about the associations of names/namespaces, but ultimately the
name/namespace pairs have a meaning to some process (human or machine)
somewhere. Where it gets that meaning from I have no clue, I just know it
has to exist. How could it not?

> -----Original Message-----
> From: John Cowan [mailto:jcowan@reutershealth.com]
> Sent: Friday, June 08, 2001 11:46 AM
> To: Jeff Lowery
> Subject: Re: Copyrighting schemas, Hailstorm (strayed a bit)
> 
> 
> Jeff Lowery wrote:
> 
> 
> > No explicit semantics, certainly, but surely the whole 
> point of a namespace
> > is to imbue its names with with meaning. Unless there's a 
> thousand monkeys
> > typing well-formed XML schemas somewhere...
> 
> 
> No, no, a thousand times no.  The whole point of a namespace is to
> distinguish your "foo" from my "foo", so that George can treat
> them differently.  That's all.
> 
> -- 
> There is / one art             || John Cowan 
> <jcowan@reutershealth.com>
> no more / no less              || http://www.reutershealth.com
> to do / all things             || http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
> with art- / lessness           \\ -- Piet Hein
>