I've been talking with Scott Hollenbeck, our IETF area director, about IETF standard practice for namespace names, and he said:
<scott>
The closest thing we have to a guideline is described in RFC 3688. I'd
recommend following the URN structure described in that document, but that
leaves some freedom for the string used to identify the namespace.
Something like "atom-1.0" could work, but I'm open to suggestions.
You can see the list of namespaces that have already been registered here:
http://www.iana.org/assignments/xml-registry/ns.html </scott>
This would give us a namespace name something like "urn:ietf:params:xml:ns:atom" which is OK I guess. I said that I liked HTTP URIs for namespace names because they leave open the door for putting some helpful info there and for things like RDDL. Furthermore, in RFC3470, which Scott co-wrote, section 4.9 agrees with me. So do sections 3.5 and 4.5.4 of the W3C's "Architecture of the World Wide Web".
Scott acknowledged this, but told me that if we go with the RFC3688 flow, there will be no fuss, no muss, and we'll get our namespace name smoothly and quickly. If we wanted to stand on principle for an HTTP name, we'd have to explain why to a whole bunch of people, and then there's the problem that the IETF doesn't maintain web space for this kind of thing, so maybe it should be in www.iana.org; anyhow, lots of extra work.
So... what's the sentiment of the WG? -Tim
