[Dev] Proposal: simplify parcel XML namespaces

[Phillip J. Eby]

At 05:29 PM 6/24/2005 -0700, Lisa Dusseault wrote:
>XML namespaces are frequently set to HTTP URLs even though they might
>well be unreachable.  The use of a domain-name plus path is to help
>ensure uniqueness (because we own the domain name) and the HTTP in
>front is just to make it a valid scheme.
>
>Which reminds me, "parcel:" is not a valid scheme -- some XML parsers
>are going to choke on that.  (I know that because they choke on the
>"DAV:" namespace).

Then we can always abuse "mid:" URIs instead.  (E.g. 
"mid:parcel.name at parcels.osafoundation.org", per RFC 2392), and if that 
breaks, report a bug.  :)

However, the XML namespace specification makes no requirement that URI's be 
of any particular URI scheme, so I'd argue that a parser which only accepts 
a limited set of schemes is unacceptably (i.e. stupidly) broken.  I would 
urge you to file bugs on XML processors that don't recognize DAV:, since 
it's a syntactically valid URI scheme, whether there exists a registered 
protocol of that name or not.

Of course, in the case of DAV:, I suspect you'll find that the actual 
breakage is expecting URI schemes to be all-lower case, and not any 
semantic validation of the scheme as such.


>Also, Phillip, what is that going to mean for the use of prefixes in
>parcel XML?

Nothing; the only developer-visible effect would be on URIs explicitly 
passed to Manager.lookup(); they would need to be of the form 
'parcel:parcel.name.here/desiredItem' instead of 
'http://osafoundation.org/parcels/parcel/name/here/desiredItem'.