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Paul Prescod wrote:
> Jonathan Borden wrote:
...
> >
> > In the case of an XML Namespace:
> >
> > <nsURI, term*>
>
> It's more complicated than that because of this:
>
> http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml-names/#Philosophy
Not really, besides that is non-normative.
...
>
> If namespace URIs are to be useful to machines then they should be
> pointers to the machine-readable information necessary to interpret what
> it means for one namespace to occur within another. Considering the
> range of namespace (ab)uses available today, from SOAP to XSLT to RDDL,
> I can't imagine what that resource would look like.
Exactly the point. Since there is no one single use for a namespace, it is
best to allow multiple referenced resources, e,g. various schemas, XSLTs,
code modules etc. Since you can't imagine what a resource would look like,
we provide the capability of defining that, and labelling the definition by
nature and purpose.
This suggests to me
> that it is safest to view namespaces as "just punctuation" and not try
> to do software dispatching on them without out-of-band knowledge that
> this actually works for the particular process you are trying to execute
> and the particular document you are working with.
>
"Just punctuation" is not very interesting, nor that useful. It would be a
real shame if we were to have spent all these years arguing over nothing. I
say treat namespace names like the URIs that they are.
Jonathan
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