Carefully following the discussion from the Amsterdam,
where he is attending WWW9, Tim Berners-Lee proposed
a transition plan to
fix the namespaces URI issue.
The proposal is a compromise based on "absolutized" URIs,
leaving room for semantic usages for the
namespace URIs, and including a non-normative warning about
relative URI usage:
"We can leave XPath and fix its
implementations to absolutize. We need to fix
the namespace spec
to take out the literal comparison wording and just refer to
URIs. This will
remove the
underlying fundamental inconsistency. (I for one had not
realized the extent
of the inconsistency
implied when I reviewed the ns spec) A warning about
relative URIs would
be motherhood and apple pie but so long as it is
non-normative it seems
reasonable.
DOM does have to be fixed, so that the base URI is
set when the document is
created.
This is going to save time later, when future layers of DOm
implement other
URI things
such as XLink. And now it will let DOM do the righ thing
wiht namespaces.
The public source XML implementations all need to
have the absolutize string
function
clearly available to remove the myths about it needing net
access or lots of
CPU time."