an unfilled need

[Rick Jelliffe]

 I note Ann Navarro's call for "An unfulfilled need" earlier this month,
on a subject I also have been calling for for 2 years+: the need for a
mechanism to bind information to names: "definitions, semantics, and
other data that may be necessary to complete their operations."    This
looks to me like a case of two non-commercial voices being lost to more
important voices.

I wonder if the reason can be found in Tim B-Ls recent post:

> Rick Jelliffe:
>>There is no W3C method to declare which schema should be
>>used, akin to the stylesheet declaration.

> Yes there is: resolution of the schema URI.

Tim is saying that using the namespace URI to specify a schema
is the official W3C method. But there is nothing about this in
any W3C spec; no working group has decided this or put it out
in a public draft or spec.

On the contrary "It is not a goal that it [the namespace URI] be
directly usable for retrieval of a schema (if any exists)"  says
XML NS.

That is a major architectural decision implied on top of namespaces;
the only parties I see that can benefit from hardcoding schema
URIs into namespace URIs are vendors, who could use this
mechanism and only provide schemas in languages which they
controlled or provided tools for: I don't think this is far-fetched--
Biztalk mandates XDR schemas only.

Rick Jelliffe



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