Re: Dumb question from a newbie on XSLT in IE5 (Namespaces etc)

[Dan Morrison <dman at es dot co dot nz>]

OK, I withdraw the 'quick hack' line. 
There are more things in XML and W3C than are dreamt of in my
philosophy...

The damn thing has an http:// in front of it tho'! Is that really needed
if the address is designed never to be actually accessed?

I optimistically imagined that available at that address could be
genuine info, at least a DTD for the system so addressed. The fact that
it gets redirected to the spec is helpful for humans, (I guess).

Would it have been correct for Microsoft, when it published its own
implimentation, to have instead specified
xmlns:xsl="http://www.microsoft.com/1999/XSL/Transform" and saved a lot
of headaches?

And on that, aren't some posters being more than a little out-of line
deriding
'the-language-known-as-xsl-in-ie5-which-is-a-completely-different-language'
when stylesheets of that ilk do indeed label themselves as conforming to
a different spec and are therefore not pretending to be what they are
not?</long sentence>

One file is XSL version X, one is XSL version Y, XSL X won't work fully
on an XSL Y interpreter. 
Who's surprised? 
To quote the First Universal Cybernetic-Kintetic-Ultramicro-Programmer -
"No blame"

Moreover, since the namespace given was of a W3C identifier, surely that
implies it was an implimentation of a spec that (although transitional)
was genuine, and not a complete Frankenstein of their own at all.
If the implimentation didn't meet the spec fully, that's too bad, but
you gotta start somewhere.

I suspect the truth is a mix of all this. 

And surely it's possible for there to be more than the One True
Namespace in the future? I'm not looking forward to it, but surely
someone could choose to redefine a spec of their own and use files with
xmlns:xsl="http://www.mystartup.com/miniXSL/".
And while that might not get supported by anyone, it would at least play
nicely with all the other files out there. The parser decides it doesn't
recognise the named implimentation, and then chooses what to do about
that. It could actually request that URL and find out more... say
download an appropriate class... or ask a process at that location to
parse it for it... :-] 

Hmm, I've come full circle and answered my question from the third
paragraph. I'll stop now. :-/

.dan.

Mike Brown wrote:
> 
> > Does the group think this is actually the way things will move, or was
> > this 'URI as a syntax definition' just a quick hack?
> 
> As David mentioned, it's a W3C Recommendation (XML Namespaces).
> 
> Someone also said on this list at one point in the recent past that URIs
> are a convenient standard (there's an RFC for them) for the syntax of
> identifiers.
> 
> Personally I think that it is good form for a URI to Uniformly Identify a
> Resource that actually exists, but the W3C Recs specifically say
> otherwise.


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