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Nicolas Lehuen wrote:
(note: I am going to respond to this message briefly, point you to some
documents which I would appreciate your reading before responding, and then
I am away, and may not respond until next week depending on my schedule)
>
> The scalability problem is on the reader's brain side. Having a long list
of
> resources in an enormous RDDL document is not very useful. The only really
> distinctive point about RDDL compared to other ideas is the fact that the
> document I obtain is readable by a human. But if it's too big or not
> structured enough or looking too much like a W3C TR (JOKE here :), nobody
> will read it.
And for the record, the resemblence to a W3C TR was NOT intended to fool
anyone, rather along the lines of "streal this code" i.e. a little prod.
The primary feature of RDDL, and something that I think needs to more
explicitly be stated in the next revision of the spec, is that RDDL allows
the owner of the DNS entry which serves as the root of the URI to specify
WHAT the namespace is, how the namespace will perform, generally what
characteristics and properties it will have. In my talk at Extreme Markup
2001 I talked about the "Laws of Physics" for the namespace as something
that the creator of the namespace may decide. Just as Newtonian mechanics,
or Einstein's Relativity or String Theory etc. may be applied to our three
or multidimensional SPACE, a nameSPACE is also a space, and the schemas it
'contains' serve as such Laws.
YOUR namespace may not have any constraints, or it may be highly
constrained. It may have a few resources or a billion. Your choice, you get
the benefits and accept the consequences.
>
> Yeah, let's get all human-readable resources out of the root RDDL
document.
> Why is it in the root RDDL document, anyway, whereas the DTDs, schemas,
> stylesheets and other related resources aren't ? Just because it is
supposed
> to be fun to be able to type the namespace URL and read something about
it.
> Like many others, I don't think this is a sufficient justification.
YOU can do this for your namespaces using RDDL. There is no requirement to
have any human readable text in the root RDDL document. You _can_ reference
resources which contain text in various languages using RDDL. You can
reference other RDDL directories. RDDL allows this, on the other hand it
does not mandate it, but it does not mandate much.
>
> Yeah, that's what I'm telling from the start of the thread. WE NEED 2
> SEPARATE MECHANISMS :
We already have two separate mechanisms which from day one, RDDL accepted
and intended. The first is RDDL itself, the second is an XML Catalog linked
via an entity resolver.
...
> > > -- a dangerous corollar of this namespace centricity is that people
keep
> on
> > > associating schemas with namespaces. This just encourages people to
have
> a
> > > twisted conception of namespaces.
> >
'Twisted conception" is an entirely subjective statement which is as of yet
unsupported by logical or scientific arguments that would allow one to judge
its validity. To be clear, I as well as a number of generally well respected
people in the XML community think that it can be _useful_ to have some
association between namespaces and schemas (not necessarily a 1:1
correlation however).
I have spoke and written about this:
[1] http://www.openhealth.org/talks/rddl.paper.xml
[2] http://www.openhealth.org/talks/What%20is%20a%20namespace.doc
[3] http://www.openhealth.org/talks/Extreme%20RDDL.ppt
[4] http://www.openhealth.org/talks/XMLBioInformatics.ppt
If you could respond to what is written in these papers, you will have a
much better chance of demonstrating to me, why this is "twisted" rather than
"useful".
My suspicion is that your concept of a namespace is entirely as a syntactic
way of indentifying XML elements. If so, there are many mechanisms of
creating unique names that do not depend on URIs. In any case I claim it is
useful to consider namespace not simply as NAMES but as SPACES, either
primordial spaces lacking structure, or as highly structured spaces. As the
legal owner of the namespace, you get to play the creator and devise your
own Laws of Physics. Good Luck.
> Any claim of using RDDL to obtain schema information is a joke, because it
> assumes that a document has namespace which has a schema ! This is a total
> mess in concepts !
>
> I really don't understand why you smart people don't see that this point
is
> a problem. It's really simple to break it ! And once again, you just
didn't
> gave me the algorithm I was asking for. Try to think about it, you'll see
> that RDDL is really flawed.
This is no joke. I am always happy to label my jokes. RDDL is not about
schema validation algorithms (that's for schemas). Please read my articles
and either accept what I say, convince me I am wrong, or we can agree to
disagree. Note that RDDL does not require _you_ to associate a namespace
with a schema.
Jonathan
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