Re: application/xml in ietf-xml-guidelines

On Wed, 2002-04-17 at 22:27, Keith Moore wrote:
> opacity of URNs is a design feature - URNs need to be opaque to do their jobs.
> 
> OTOH, I have no fondness for use of URNs to identify vocabularies either.
> 
> We've known essentially how we were going to resolve URNs since 1 November 
> 1995.  The biggest problem we've had in finishing the specifications is that 
> URNs were so widely misunderstood that we were continually having to argue with 
> people who were insisting that they have properties that would make them 
> unusable for their intended purpose.

I suspect there's a level of agreement underneath the apparent
disagreement.  You want URNs to be opaque; I want namespace identifiers
to be transparent (or at least translucent.)

Using URIs as namespace identifiers may have been a bad choice all
round, though I've not heard anyone really admit that, much less shout
it out loud.

The question here seem to come down to whether it's the namespace
identifier-nature that matters or the URI-nature that matters.  Given
that the document section is titled "Namespaces", I'm inclined to vote
for the namespace identifier-nature and focus on what works best for
identifying vocabularies rather than arguing about the value of URN/L/I.

Given current IETF politics/policy, I suspect there's not much room for
such an opinion.

-- 
Simon St.Laurent
Ring around the content, a pocket full of brackets
Errors, errors, all fall down!
http://simonstl.com