ietf-mxcomp
[Top] [All Lists]

RE: XML name space (was: suggested new RRtype experiment)

2004-05-24 18:43:09

On Mon, 2004-05-24 at 16:54, Hallam-Baker, Phillip wrote:
It MUST be controlled by the standard and not become a prerogative of
every programmer wishing to publish new definitions.  

Absolutely not. That is not how the Internet was built, really it
is not.

The Internet was not meant to be a Stalinist environment where every
change was the result of central planning. That model was tried with
OSI.

The idea of using namespaces in place of registered identifiers
was exactly to escape political control. At the time I suggested it
the people designing PICS were planning to have an IANA like registry
of censorship schemes. I thought it would be better if anyone who wanted
could become a censor and people could chose their own censorship
scheme. It had the desired effect.

XML adopted the same architecture because they understood that
a central registry of XML schemas was bound to fail.

IANA was not created to exercise political control, that was not
an intended function (although it has been used as such). The
function of IANA is simply to avoid collisions and avoid exhausting
the number space.

IANA ensures consistent treatment of protocol fields.  This is not to
enable political control, it enables compatibility.  In the case of a
concise set of definitions to assess content of DNS TXT RR, the less
needed to convey requisite information, the better.  If different
information needs to be conveyed where revision is needed, then
documenting such changes in the form of a specification is appropriate. 
The consumer of this information is not a human wondering about the
rating of a website expecting inconsistent representations. 

This is not changing the way XML works, but rather this removes all
portions dedicated to defining namespace and data structure and replaces
this with a single token.  This token may then allow both brevity and
consistency needed for a such a substantial enterprise on the Internet.

-Doug