URI's in namespaces

[Jeffrey E. Sussna]

Not to rouse the fitfully sleeping namespace beast, but I can't get it out
of my mind. In particular, I have a dumb question:

If the namespace facility designers were adamant that a namespace identifier
doesn't necessarily point to any actual schema, then why did they use URI's
as namespace "targets". The whole notion of URI implies that there's
something (i.e., the resource) out there. But a namespace is not inherently
a pointer (regardless of whether you can access the thing pointed to). Why
not just make namespace targets ordinary XML names?

Jeff Sussna


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