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I was attempting to make a pragmatic point, not a criticism of the RDDL
language. If I deference a namespace URI and find nothing, I don't know
whether it was intended by the doc author that there be nothing there, or
there was supposed to be something there but the URI had a typo. If the
host mentioned in that namespace URI is down and I'm hoping to find, say, a
collection of stylesheet resources, or a jar file to use to process the
original document, I don't know whether to try again later or look somewhere
else. If I never dereference the namespace URI, I won't know what useful
things I might have missed. That's why I'd like to know whether to expect
to find something or not, perhaps by some additional attributes, by some
convention involving the URI type, or something else.
Jeff
----- Original Message -----
From: "Jonathan Borden" <jborden@mediaone.net>
To: "Jeff Greif" <jgreif@alumni.princeton.edu>; "Leigh Dodds"
<ldodds@ingenta.com>; "Bullard, Claude L (Len)" <clbullar@ingr.com>
Cc: <xml-dev@lists.xml.org>
Sent: Friday, January 18, 2002 12:22 PM
Subject: Re: [xml-dev] RDDL (was RE: [xml-dev] Negotiate Out The Noise)
> Jeff Greif wrote:
>
> > The unfortunate problem with RDDL and all the alternatives except (1) is
> > that you cannot tell without looking whether there will be something at
an
> > NS URI, and if there is, whether you need to know about it.
>
> Suppose you simply decide never to dereference a URI regardless of what it
> looks like. How does the existence of a document which _can_ be
dereferenced
> affect your life? As has already been said, you can always use google.
> Indeed a tenet of the RDF framework is that URIs are opaque. One derives
the
> properties of a resource by what is said "about" the resource, not by
> dereferencing its URI. One never _has_ to dereference a URI to use RDF.
Nor
> does one have to dereference a namespace URI _ever_ if all one want to do
is
> use XML namespaces as a way to disambiguate element names. What could you
> "need to know about"?
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