Re: RDDL: new natures

• From: Elliotte Harold <elharo@...>
• To: Jonathan Borden <jonathan@...>
• Date: Mon, 11 Dec 2006 09:32:17 -0500

Jonathan Borden wrote:

> When I say that the rddl:nature of http://example.org/foo.xsd is "XML 
> Schema", this is intended to assert that it is reasonable to assume that 
> http://example.org/foo.xsd ought comply with the "XML Schema" 
> specification i.e. validate as an "XML Schema".


I believe this to be sufficiently asserted by 
xlink:role="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema"

> What I *don't* want to say is that <http://example.org/foo.xsd> is a 
> member of the XML Schema namespace. 

Good. xlink:role="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" does not say that.

In fact, I'm not sure anything would. URLs and documents are not 
generally considered to be members of a namespace. The document at 
http://example.org/foo.xsd could say that the root element is a member 
of the namespace with a xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" 
attribute; but that's a very different thing.


> Using 
> <http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema> as the URI for the nature of "XML 
> Schema" creates this ambiguity for ***software agents***. 

In practice XML software agents are indeed smart enough to distinguish 
between xlink:role="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" and 
xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" and even 
xlink:href="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema". I don't think there's any 
ambiguity here we need to worry about.


-- 
Elliotte Rusty Harold  elharo@...
Java I/O 2nd Edition Just Published!
http://www.cafeaulait.org/books/javaio2/
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