RE: Namespace name: better to use URN or URL?

[John Evdemon <jevdemon@vitria.com>]

On Tuesday, September 04, 2001 4:52 PM Brian Hayes wrote:
> 
> I prefer URNs since URLs tend to imply that I need to have a web
> server running that responds to the URL and can serve up the 
> schemas
>
Only if someone needs to resolve them.  Namespaces are just unique values.
There is no requirement (or expectation) to resolve the URI used as a
namespace value.  

> Perhaps one thing to clarify is to ask what namespaces are
> primarily intended to do.  
> 
The purpose of XML namespaces is to distinguish between duplicate element
type and attribute names, not necessarily for pointing to additional online
resources.

The namespace itself may be identified by a URI.  Any element type or
attribute name within an XML namespace can be uniquely identified by a
two-part name: the URI of its XML namespace and its local name.  Anything
else is a potential extension of the rec.