[tei-council] Conformance draft: namespace purity

[James Cummings]

Conal Tuohy wrote:
> On Mon, 2007-04-02 at 23:30 +0100, Sebastian Rahtz wrote:
>> I would strongly suggest that people use something
>> based on their project URL if they have one.
> I agree.

I don't think anyone is disagreeing that this is desirable, if they have a
project URL.


> But I think this W3 guideline implies we should not suggest an http URI
> which starts with "http://www.tei-c.org/ns/user-defined/" (or similar)
> because that might imply that we would be maintaining a register of
> customisations. The namespace URI should clearly belong to the person
> making the customisation, not to the TEI Consortium.

I think this is enough to convince me that having user-defined NS at
tei-c.org is not a good idea.  I think that:

1) the Roma web-form input for the namespace should defaultly be blank
(unless the ODD has already got a namespace),
2) that ODD needs somewhere agreed upon to store this namespace,
3) that there should be help text next to the box stating something like:
"Required: Add your project namespace here for any new elements you create.
 We suggest that this is based on the URL for your project.  Perhaps
something like http://www.ProjectName.org/ns/1.0"

> However, if the project doesn't have a website, then it might prove a
> barrier to provide a "namespace document". During the development phase
> of a project, it might not be clear what namespace URI would be best, so
> a temporary URI might be needed. In such cases, rather than use an HTTP
> URI, they could use some other kind of URI, such as a "tag" URI, e.g.
> 
> "tag:conal.tuohy at gmail.com,2007:xmlns/my-customisation"

I don't like this idea.  Even if they don't have a website, they can create
a temporary URI, it doesn't even have to point to a real site.  (While not
best practice, this is within the W3C recommendation I believe?)  I feel
the tag uri will just confuse them more.

-James

-- 
Dr James Cummings, Oxford Text Archive, University of Oxford
James dot Cummings at oucs dot ox dot ac dot uk