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>The most oft-cited reason for using URIs (especially URLs (and especially
>HTTP URLs)) is that you can guarantee uniqueness. Since nobody else uses
>www.sernaferna.com, I can create a URI (again, people usually use URLs)
>including that domain name, and be fairly sure nobody else is using it.
>
>But is this benefit really worth all of the bother of trying to use the
>little-understood URIs for namespace names? (And don't kid
>yourselves; very
>few claim to understand the zen of URI, and I'd be willing to bet cold hard
>cash that even those few disagree with each other.) I can really, truly,
>understand using URNs for namespace names, they're a good fit, but URLs...
The zen of URIs? They're uniform and identify resources - what more is
there...and what is all this bother?
Leveraging a URL into use as a namespace identifier has at least two
benefits - uniqueness is easier to maintain, and it's possible to use the
URL to provide more information about the namespace.
>The costs (mass confusion, thousands upon thousands of emails to XML-DEV,
>thousands of person-hours burned on discussing the issue ad infinitum) just
>seem to vastly outweigh the benefits (easier uniqueness) of using certain
>types of URI (HTTP URLs being the most common, and most
>ill-fitted, example,
>IMHO).
Costs that only apply to xml-dev subscribers don't really add much weight in
the general scheme of things. Easier uniqueness is a big benefit all round.
>So what are the other benefits of using URI for namespace names, that I'm
>missing?
(I'll take that as referring to URL-style URIs)
They've already been discussed at length??
>Do people have these kinds of problems with Java package names?
I tend to avoid using things in Java package namespaces like java.net or
even com.sun for exactly the same reason I wouldn't use http://www.sun.com
for XML namespaces. If I use something more or less based on a domain name
I've registered I can be fairly sure it's not going to clash anywhere, even
though I'm not likely to be doing much class loading over http. Essentially
solving the uniqueness problem by leveraging URLs. Any problems? The Java
mailing lists are full of posts from people who've missed naming something
on their classpath - but this doesn't impact much on the rest of the world
either.
Cheers,
Danny.
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