On Fri, 2020-07-24 at 16:48 +0000, Eliot Kimber ekimber(_at_)contrext(_dot_)com
wrote:
If my memory is correct, we (the XML Working Group) wanted to use PIs
for namespace declarations
Yes, i remember there was such a proposal.
The design decision was overridden by Tim Berners-Lee and we were not
happy about it but there wasn't much we could do. It was that
overriding of a technical decision that led me to leave the W3C
You and Jon both, i think.
Tim never understood what we were trying to do with XML, and as
recently as 2008 or 2010 was saying that we meeded to make quotes
optional around attribute values in XML. At one point he even said it'd
be worth it to save bandwidth.
[...]
I also objected to the fact that the namespace spec seemed to imply
(or did not clearly refute the assumption) that there was, in
general, some knowable relationship between namespace names and
vocabularies when there is not
Right.
One could imagine some kind of DNS-like system for mapping from
namespace names to formal grammar definitions, but then who would use
it?
We had a very basic version of that in SoftQuad Panorama - when it
fetched a document it looked alongside it for a catalogue file (not an
XML Catalog) that would point to various other resources that might be
wanted, such as style sheets, DTDs and so forth. I remember trying to
communicate the importance, as i saw it, of this design, and failing.
But I don't think the vast majority of namespace users understand
this somewhat subtle aspect of namespaces.
Indeed not. And most of the time it doesn't matter. When it
does...you're stuck :)
Liam
--
Liam Quin, https://www.delightfulcomputing.com/
Available for XML/Document/Information Architecture/XSLT/
XSL/XQuery/Web/Text Processing/A11Y training, work & consulting.
Barefoot Web-slave, antique illustrations: http://www.fromoldbooks.org
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