RDF not conforming to the Namespace spec?

[Richard L. Goerwitz]

"Roger L. Costello" wrote, re elements like "creator" (which may not be
defined by a given DTD, but which must occur in a document instance that
is using RDF):

> My agent has never seen the property "creator", so it follows the
> namespace URI to the property schema...

Okay, so your agent is reading the document.  It runs into an element
in another RDF namespace.  You want to use that namespace's URI component
to read in additional schema information.

Two problems:  1) namespace URIs don't necessarily point to schemas, and
2) if they did, you'd be extending the schema mechanism in a way that's
incompatible with DTDs, as they're normally defined and understood.

I don't know if its possible, from an implementation standpoint, to add
the DTD after you've already started parsing the document.  And if you to
could, whether doing so would be reasonable.

Surely this sort of problem has been discussed in the SGML community.
Can someone who has hashed all the details out already perhaps post with
some commentary?

-- 

Richard Goerwitz
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