In previous messages, Andy made two useful points. (I'm not sure, but I
think that Doug may have been making one or both of them too.)
1. The right namespace for us to use is defined by BCP 81 (RFC 3688).
(If I read it correctly, our namespace and schema ought to be something
like "urn:ietf:params:xml:schema:marid-1".) IANA will register this
name, along with the complete contents of the schema.
2. We can employ various hacks to obviate the need to store the above
string in DNS records.
I agree with both of these.
In the spec that I'm writing, I'm currently planning to say that the
relevant XML document is formed by taking the contents of a DNS record,
then prefixing it with
<?XML VERSION="1.0" CHARSET="US-ASCII">
<root xmlns="urn:ietf:params:xml:schema:marid-1"
(possibly define other useful namespace prefixes here) >
and suffixing it with
</root>
This provides a nice formalism about what the record really means. Of
course, an implementer is not required to physically form the
concatenated string and push it through an XML parser, if he can arrive
at a semantically equivalent result through different means.
-- Jim Lyon
mailto:jimlyon(_at_)microsoft(_dot_)com