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> :::4. An interpretation of XML and namespaces:::
>
> This section doesn't seem to give an interpretation of namespaces
especially
> after previous section leaves the reader hanging but instead seems to
dwell on
> the philosphical question of what should be done about elements with no
> namespace URI.I think that entire section is an unecessary digression that
> disrupts the flow of the article.
Yeah, you're right, I'll try to fix this the four first sections ordering.
> :::5. An interpretation of schemas:::
>
> I like the way this section describes the relationship (or lack thereof)
> between namespaces and schemas.
>
> :::8. A proposal for an answer to the riddle : the Namespace Description
> Language:::
>
> You state
>
> "What should I obtain when resolving a namespace name ? A Namespace
> Description Language document. This is NOT a collection of names, but a
> program can build a collection of names from it.
>
> Apart from the different names appearing in the namespace, what
information
> could the NDL document provide ? Well, I'm not sure yet, but I think that
for
> each name which corresponds to an element name, there should be the
definition
> of the correponding element type URI. This URI would enable us to fetch a
> meta-data RD and get some associated resources, like a human-readable
> documentation of the general meaning (e.g. out of any pattern) of the
tag."
>
> This reads like a reinvention of RDDL to me. The interesting problems that
> RDDL doesn't solve are
I won't try to reinvent RDDL. I just rename it to NDL so that there is no
doubt about its purpose, and precisely tell that the root purpose of NDL is
to enumerate the various names a namespace contains. Document and element
type will be defined in section 7, but I still have to think about it.
> (a.) Where to place RDDL files for XML documents containing elements from
> multiple namespaces such as MSFT's annotated XSD schemas for creating XML
> views of relational data that typically contain elements from 2 or 3
> namespaces (as a practical example)
This will be described in part 6.3. I'll suggest that we link XML documents
(single or multi-namespaced) with their meta-data resource directory (the
equivalent of RDDL but not restricted to namespace) through a Processing
Instruction, like in the examples I gave to Leigh. But this is purely a
choice made on aesthetics grounds for now, so I'd like to think more about
it. One of the reasons that make me reject the special attribute strategy
used by XML Schema is that special attributes modify the labeled tree of the
document, whereas PIs can be considered as "out-of-band" data.
> and similarly
>
> (b.) Where to place RDDL files for namespaces that do not have a
resolvable
> namespace URI.
>
> Your description of a NDL doesn't seem to address these problems.
I hope to be able to integrate the meta-data resource directory features
with a catalog-like feature. This way, you specify the resource-directory
URL (and I insist on the URL for now) through a PI, then you can use it to
resolve all URIs. The meta-data resource directory could therefore be used
to fetch NDL (or old-school RDDL) documents, even if the namespace URIs are
not directly resolvable.
Thanks for your time,
Regards,
Nicolas
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