Namespace URI address resources

[Tim Bray]

At 10:24 AM 6/15/99 -0700, Andrew Layman wrote:
>I suggest that there is a vast difference between something such as a
>schema, which creates identifiers and gives them a definition, and other
>resources such as style sheets that may be permanently or ephemerally
>associated with those identifiers.  One defines the data; the other
>indicates processing.  
...
>This argues that the first position is correct, namely that using a
>namespace URI to retrieve a schema is reasonable and is different in kind
>from retrieval of other possibly-related resources.

We disagree, but that's not very helpful because it seems mostly to
be a matter of of opinion/religion.  I suspect that in the future 
data-driven Web, the *first* thing I'm going to want when I get a 
chunk of XML is the java classes or COM objects to do something
useful with it, the second thing is a stylesheet, the third thing
is a different stylesheet, and the schema is way down the list
somewhere.  Because I think schemas are mostly useful in the
context of data *creation*, and in many apps we want data to be 
consumed many more times than it is produced.

But that's just me.  What I am reasonably sure of, though, that for any 
one of these things (stylesheets, schemas, code, etc), there is going to be 
some user community for whom that item is the single thing they need, and 
will want to use the namespace URI to get it, and they will have 
trouble seeing why the schema should be primus inter pares. -T.

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