Uniform Resource Identifier - Relation To XML Namespaces

Relation To XML Namespaces

XML has a concept of a namespace, an abstract domain to which a collection of element and attribute names can be assigned. The namespace name (a character string which must adhere to the generic URI syntax) identifies an XML namespace. However, the namespace name is generally not considered to be a URI because the 'URI-ness' of strings is, according to the URI specification, based on their intended use, not just their lexical components. A namespace name also does not necessarily imply any of the semantics of URI schemes; a namespace name beginning with 'http:', for example, likely has nothing to do with the HTTP protocol. XML professionals have debated this thoroughly on the xml dev electronic mailing list; some feel that a namespace name could be a URI, since the collection of names comprising a particular namespace could be regarded as a resource that is being identified, and since a version of the 'Namespaces in XML' specification says that the namespace name is a URI reference. But the consensus seems to suggest that a namespace name is just a string that happens to look like a URI, nothing more.

Initially, the namespace name could match the syntax of any non-empty URI reference, but an erratum to the 'Namespaces In XML Recommendation' later deprecated the use of relative URI references. A separate specification, issued for namespaces for XML 1.1, allows IRI references, not just URI references, to serve as the basis for namespace names.

To mitigate confusion that began to arise among newcomers to XML from the use of URIs (particularly HTTP URLs) for namespaces, a descriptive language called RDDL (Resource Directory Description Language) developed, though the specification of RDDL has no official standing and no relevant organization (such as W3C) has considered or approved it. An RDDL document can provide machine- and human-readable information about a particular namespace and about the XML documents that use it. Authors of XML documents were encouraged to put RDDL documents in locations such that if a namespace name in their document somehow becomes de-referenced, then an RDDL document would be obtained, thus satisfying the desire among many developers for a namespace name to point to a network-accessible resource.