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Norm Walsh writes;
> I see two central arguments in this piece:
>
> 1. Globally unique names aren't necessary. The context is, in
> practice, always well known. It follows that it's not a problem that
> your <forsale> for a distributed ebay application and my <forsale> for
> a distributed real estate application mean entirely different things.
> You're not really going to point your bidder at my files and I'm not
> going to point my real-estate searcher at your files.
I'm very confused about how you see this as an argument in the piece.
The article doesn't so much as mention namespaces. All it says (in my
reading) is that putting XML up on the Web is interesting and useful.
Did you read:
http://bitworking.org/wellformed.html
Or did you click through to something else?
> If I want to build a document that inventories the things I've
> purchased, I won't be able to mix the <forsale> elements for things I
> bought by distributed ebay with the <forsale> elements for investment
> properties I've purchased. But how often do I need to do that in
> practice? Where the rubber really meets the road, embedding SVG and
> MathML in
> DocBook for example, there really is enough context (<svg> only occurs
> in
> <imageobject>s, <mml> only occurs in <equations>, etc.)
>
> I think this would represent a serious challenge for vocabularies that
> want you to be able to mix "your vocabulary here" (I'm thinking of
> schema annotations and XSLT top-level elements.) But again, you don't
> need to do that globally.
>
> You may be right.
Maybe, but I don't think that argument is made anywhere in the piece.
> Similarly, the semantics of a vocabulary are always known to the users
> of the vocabulary and there's no benefit in associating semantics in
> an independent, programmatic way. And really, if I wanted to
> communicate the semantics of <forsale> and <bid>, I could do it by
> transformation.
>
> You may be right.
>
> But what's preventing you from implementing this vision today? No one
> says you must use namespaces. No one says you must use any technology
> you don't want to.
The writer makes clear that he doesn't want to use RDF, but apart from
the fact that he doesn't use namespaces in his his examples, I don't
think he makes the complaint you suggest.
> Now, if you're developing a technology that you want to interoperate
> with other technologies that have adopted namespaces for global name
> disambiguation and RDF for describing semantic relationships, I might
> encourage you to use those technologies as well. I might even express
> the opinion that I think you should.
>
> I think there are significant benefits (engineering, training, etc.)
> in reusing technologies. Even technologies that aren't exactly the way
> I'd like them to be.
I don't see any place in this document that argues otherwise. The
strongest thing claim I see here is that XML 1.0 is useful stuff when
put on the Web.
Maybe Joe will have some better answers to your questions.
-------------
Simon St.Laurent - SSL is my TLA
http://simonstl.com may be my URI
http://monasticxml.org may be my ascetic URI
urn:oid:1.3.6.1.4.1.6320 is another possibility altogether
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