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

[John Cowan <cowan@mercury.ccil.org>]

Liam R E Quin scripsit:

> We should not have included public identifiers in XML at all - it would
> have been better than including them without defining how they worked,
> when SYSTEM urn:foo has the potential to be just as good and SYSTEM
> http://... had the potential to be better.

IMO the true error was to identify URIs with system ids rather than
public ids.  If you had said that a system id has only local meaning (as
in SGML) whereas a public id could be either a URI or an FPI, public ids
would have continued to be extremely useful and w3.org wouldn't be being
hammered by requests for various DTDs.  But that's blood under the dam.

RFC 3151 was my attempt to get FPIs into the URI space.  More blood.

-- 
John Cowan           http://www.ccil.org/~cowan            cowan@ccil.org
One of the oil men in heaven started a rumor of a gusher down in hell.  All
the other oil men left in a hurry for hell.  As he gets to thinking about
the rumor he had started he says to himself there might be something in
it after all.  So he leaves for hell in a hurry.    --Carl Sandburg