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To be clear, I introduced the term "rot". URIs
are not rotten; they are the systemic agreement
that makes the web work, the first principle so
to speak. I think the rot comes of overloading
them and not clearly enunciating principles for
how to deal with potential ambiguities that arise
from that overloading, that is, not emphasizing
the role of interpretants. When Joshua Allen
talks about hypertext dispensers, when we talk
about namespace handling in XSLT, etc., we are
talking about not the languages, but the rules
of the processors, the interpretants that take
a name and using their local rules for disambiguation
and application, interpreting that name.
The rest is the politics of recognizing authorities
and that is a negotiation. I don't know that
namespaces are broken; by dint of secondary specification,
an overloaded name from an implementing architecture
is introduced into a name system for implemented languages.
It works but it means that the implemented language
must absorb the semantics of the overloaded name and
therefore must be clear about recognizing the prescriptions
of that external authority. It is a shared allele.
len
-----Original Message-----
From: jborden@attbi.com [mailto:jborden@attbi.com]
Simon,
>
> Yep. I don't think solutions will be forthcoming, hence the word
> "quarantine" in the subject line. Some things are just too broken to
> fix.
One can certainly look into the archives to find support for whatever viewpoint one chooses, however I submit that XML Namespaces are no more 'broken' than the Web itself. Both are 'broken' and both are useful. Both raise questions and are food for debate.
>
> > The rot is in the URI. It has to be solved there.
>
> Yes.
>
Well, URIs are an essential part of the Web as we know it, and the Web as practiced. You can call them 'rot' but rid yourselves of URIs and you've rid yourself of the Web as we know it today, for better or worse. Now, certainly there is work to be done to clarify how URIs are intended to be used, etc., but like it or not, if you want to deal with the Web (as I do) you need to deal with URIs. All so called issues with XML Namespaces are just issues with URIs in disguise.
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