Re: [xml-dev] The purpose of a namespace URI is ...

[David Carlisle <davidc@nag.co.uk>]

On 01/12/2012 20:04, Timothy W. Cook wrote:
> I cannot decide from the conversation if this is considered best
> practice or not.

Not everyone agrees but many people think it's a _terrible_ idea to
version the namespace.

If you have xpath/xquery queries working with one version they won't
work at all with the second version (and it's hard to make a query work
with both) as all the names have changed. You may not be using xpath but
that's just an example of the general issue that changing all the
element names is a _major_ change, not something that should be done
just because you need to bump a version number.

So unless you are in a situation where it's critical that any tools
working with version one don't work at all with version two then
changing the namespace is a bad idea. There is no need to tie the
namespae URI to the schema location so you can still have variant schema
for the various versions without changing the namespace, just as all
versions of xhtml share a namespace.

David


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