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

["Fuchs, Matthew" <matthew.fuchs@commerceone.com>]

John,

While I'd love to agree with you, discussions in the XML Schema WG revealed
(to me, at least) that the notion that a qualified name uniquely identifies
anything is far from established.  The whole thread on XSDL local element
declarations and namespaces shows that that opinion seems to be shared by
others in the community.

It looks like all we can say is that Namespaces are just a mechanism for
creating two-part names in XML documents.  Nothing beyond that has
consensus.  But I'd love to agree with you.

Matthew

> -----Original Message-----
> From: John Evdemon [mailto:jevdemon@vitria.com]
> Sent: Tuesday, September 04, 2001 2:42 PM
> To: Hayes, Brian; xml-dev@lists.xml.org
> Subject: RE: Namespace name: better to use URN or URL?
> 
> 
> 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.
> 
> 
> 
> 
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