Bill, I was just writing a follow up to my woefully terse email. You have covered the exact points that I wanted to bring up and I am in perfect agreement.
Regards, Alan > -----Original Message----- > From: Bill de h�ra [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > Sent: Saturday, May 22, 2004 9:42 AM > To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > Subject: Re: Version numbers in namespaces > > Alan D. Cabrera wrote: > > Interesting. Personally, I don't care for the #info aspect of the > > namespace. > > Some background on #: > > In RDF-land (where this idiom comes from), this is considered by a > number of people as broken and I imagine it's quietly being > deprecated over the last few years. It's good that people want to > make readable URIs for the purposes of quick eyeballing, but the > idea of algorithimically hacking into an opaque name by putting > markers into it is dubious. It doesn't make things clearer that the > strings we're using for XML Namespace /names/ are in fact > /structures/ wrt the Web (but that's a long running and heated > perma-thread in XML). > > > Personally, I don't encourage #fragid use in namespaces - you don't > need fragment structure for (an opaque) name. Again personally, I > would disagree with the Cocoon consensus. Mixing XML namespaces and > document structures is a messy affair. > > Beyond that, current practice seems to be focusing on the idea of > putting time into names, not version numbers. So you have something > like this: > > http://www.apache.org/foo/bar/2004/05/22 > http://www.apache.org/foo/bar/2004/05 > http://www.apache.org/foo/bar/2004 > > That's useful insofar as it gives flexbility as to how to decide to > upgrade physical schema wrt a version number. If you use version > numbers you tie your names into the upgrade strategy of whatever > versioning policies are in place. Possibly over time, that will not > be what you want, given that versioning is just about a difficult > problem as your are likely to find in this industry (it's right up > there with naming and cache invalidation in my book). > > For example, I do a lot of work with particular XML enveloping > structure that has embedded "1.0" in its namespace. I dearly wish a > date had been use as would have avoided interminable confusion and > deadlock around what were non-breaking and editorial alterations to > schema. "2001" would have been easier all round. > > If the consensus here is to put version numbers into namespace names > then I suggest that only the major number is inserted. I also > suggest that a versioning policy be laid down first. But with dates > you can defer such policy decisions and/or change them if required. > > cheers > Bill de h�ra > >
