RE: [xml-dev] Draft US Government policyon XML Namespaces

["Dare Obasanjo" <dareo@microsoft.com>]

I think the reasoning in this paper needs more clarification. Some issues are minor pedantic points such as where they seem to imply that prefixes are required for namespace qualified elements and others are more significant such as where they advise against using URLs as namespace identifiers because they aren't required to be dereferencable. 
 
Part of me feels that there is significant context left out of the document that explains this recommendation more thoroughly. The fact that they call out that URNs are meant to be location independent identifiers while URLs are not seems to be significant although the current web infrastructure can make mimic this for URLs using HTTP 301. The authors seem to be accepting the transcience of URLs [which the W3C TAG likes to pretend doesn't exist] by advocating their position but it would be beneficial if this was explicitly stated in the document. 
 
More importantly, I'd expect that one would recommend that entities placed web dereferencable documentation about their namespaces at the namespace URL. The fact that the authors do the opposite of this is puzzling and also could do with clarification.  

________________________________

From: Bullard, Claude L (Len) [mailto:clbullar@ingr.com]
Sent: Tue 4/15/2003 6:39 AM
To: XML Dev
Subject: RE: [xml-dev] Draft US Government policyon XML Namespaces



Well worth reading.  Unexpected conclusion.

len

-----Original Message-----
From: Tim Bray [mailto:tbray@textuality.com]

http://www.xml.gov/documents/in_progress/namespacePolicyDraft.htm


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