Re: Finishing the XML-tagging discussion

[Tim Bray <tbray@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

At 12:10 PM 3/21/00 -0500, John Cowan wrote:
>> Hmmm, if you believe this is a good idea, the answer is obvious: the
>> namespace of the root element.
>
>Insufficient.  Suppose we have an XHTML-1.1 based document, and you
>are trying to negotiate depending on some non-HTML content in it
>(metadata, e.g.)  The root element's namespace is not particularly
>privileged, and may be the least important namespace in the document.

I think that content-negotiation is probably way out of its depth when trying 
to deal with seriously-compound documents.  Maybe this isn't a good idea after 
all.  At the end of the day, I suspect that there should be a simple (ideally 
one-to-one) mapping between namespaces and media-types.  Which would make the 
namespace idea superfluous. -Tim