Availability of WG and SIG archives (was Re: Namespaces and XML validation)

[james anderson]

Peter Murray-Rust wrote:
> 
>...
> >
> >i am at a point where, should the present namespace wd eventually be
> ratified,
> >it would leave me no option, but to produce non-conforming software, if said
> >software is to function adequately. not because i am at odds with the drafts
> >goals, and not because there are inherent inadequacies in either
> namespaces or
> >dtd's, but because the present draft describes an encoding and suggests
> >implementation mechanisms which are incomplete wrt its own stated goals.
> 
> My own view (which I stated to the SIG) was that the goals weren't clear
> enough. Unlike many other drafts there are no 10 golden rules against which
> to measure the draft.

i have been taking the second and third sentences in the section on
"motivation and summary" at face value. they read

"... documents, [which contain] markup from multiple independent sources, pose
problems of recognition and collision. Software modules need to be able to
recognize the markup (tags and attributes) which they are designed to process,
even in the face of "collisions" occurring when markup intended for some other
software package uses the same element type or attribute name.

These considerations require that document constructs should have names, whose
scope extends beyond the containing document. this specification describes a
mechanism, XML namespaces, which accomplishes this."

i may quibble with the wording, and i may differ with the authors, in that it
would greatly simplfy processing if one recognized that the same problem
applies to entites, notations, etc, but i understand this to be a clear and
unequivocal the goal - even in the absence of golden rules.

i'm not talking about inheritance - of attributes (per se) or of type, or
about architectural forms, or about typing attribute values or element
content. just about decoding and encoding names unambiguously.

i'm directing attention to the fact, that the present draft suggests encodings
and mechanisms which are not sufficient to accomplish this, its own correct
and achievable goal.

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