Overloaded URIs (was Re: XLink: behavior must go!)

[John E. Simpson]

At 11:30 AM 06/13/1999 -0500, WorldNet wrote:
>> >http://www.w3.org/XSL/Transform/1.0
>> > 
>> > Is someone going to put something retrievable there?
>> 
>> Why should something retrievable be put there? It functions just fine as
>> a unique name without having to retrieve anything.
>
>If someone could explain, I don't understand yet why a reference to such a
>'namespace' would be useful, particularly if there is nothing there to
>access other than the seemingly ephemeral reference itself.

The idea is that a namespace identifier just needs to be a unique
differentiator among element and attribute names that otherwise might be
identical across various XML applications. The URI scheme has been
suggested as a familiar way to accomplish this. I still haven't made up my
own mind about it, but (to me) its chief flaw is that it *suggests* to a
namespace-unaware human reader that There Is a "There" There.
Namespace-aware software, however, doesn't make that mistake, which (again,
to me) probably renders the flaw moot.
==========================================================
John E. Simpson            | The secret of eternal youth
simpson at polaris.net        | is arrested development.
http://www.flixml.org      |  -- Alice Roosevelt Longworth

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