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

[Ogievetsky, Nikita]

James Tauber wrote:
	I suggested this to TimBL at WWW8 but he didn't buy it. My argument
went
	something like this:

	1. Namespace URIs don't have to point to anything retrievable, they
are just
	unique identifiers
	2. Some URI schemes might not be web-retrievable (eg
"isbn:1-23456-789-0")
	3. Some URI schemes *are* web-retrievable (eg
http://www.megginson.com/ns/)
	4. So namespaces URIs *can* point to something, though, such as a
	human-readable description of the namespace, if they use a URI
scheme that
	is web-retrievable.
	5. If this is done, how does one distinguish referencing the
namespace from
	referencing the file describing the namespace

And in some cases like with xsl, xlink, etc. 
the alias itself becomes unique ( even though one can use the word
"reserved").
And the URI becomes a version number.

Let us say I will start using "xthing:" alias for namespaces 
in my documents. How can I be guarantied that next year 
somebody will not come up with XThing recommendation
and future versions of XML parsers will make it a reserved word?
Isn't it against some basic XML principles?

	6. My suggestion: come up with a new URI scheme that has the same
	scheme-specific syntax as an http URI but that is only intended as a
unique
	identifier.

Another crazy idea: use xlink to describe namespaces 


			Nikita Ogievetsky





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