URIs as IDs in ModSAX (was Re: ModSAX (SAX 1.1) Proposal) (fwd)

[Dan Brickley]

This and previous forwarded from an (accidentally!) off-list discussion.

To recap, the proposal is that SAX feature identifiers are typed as URI
(ie. superset of URLs and URNs) to give a globally managed namespace,
without associating additional semantics with those names. 

Dan

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Wed, 17 Feb 1999 09:50:22 -0500 (EST)
From: David Megginson <david at megginson.com>
To: Dan Brickley <Daniel.Brickley at Bristol.ac.uk>
Subject: URIs as IDs in ModSAX (was Re: ModSAX (SAX 1.1) Proposal)

Dan Brickley writes:

 > Here's a small proposal:
 >  
 > >     public abstract void setFeature (String featureID, boolean state)
 > 
 > becomes public abstract void setFeature (URI featureID, boolean state)
 > 
 > (or leave as String but with understanding that the datatype of
 > featureID is anything that's a legal Web URI)

Yes, using URIs was my original idea, and I'm still very partial to
it; I've been using the Java-package-style names in my examples, but
I'd like to know what everyone thinks about the issue.

I'd prefer not the use the java.net.URL class, though -- I don't think 
it buys us anything, since the URIs are not mean to be dereferenced.

 > Justification:
 > 	setFeature needs to be passed an identifying string that
 > 	uniquely picks out some property. Rather than go with the
 > 	pseudo-uri's in Java, it would be more in the spirit of XML
 > 	and Web to use URIs. Using URIs is also more friendly towards
 > 	non-Java implementations of the SAX API.

I'm strongly inclined to agree.  Does anyone have a strong case
against?


All the best,


David

-- 
David Megginson                 david at megginson.com
           http://www.megginson.com/


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