From: "Arjun Ray" <aray@[...].net> 

>  | The namespaces set general semantics, 
>  
>  I don't think this is true.  The fact that a bunch of universal names share a
>  URI "prefix" is no more than a coincidence.  They need not be parts of any
>  coherent schema at all.  They're just a smorgasbord.
 
"set" is the wrong word: I should have said "The namespaces evidence the original specific
semantics, which we can think of as the general semantics that we may have diverged from."  
By which I mean the URI indicates who was the originator of the element, who *of course* 
has some semantic intent in the elements (even as a smorgasbord). This excludes that the 
namespace necessarily means that the element has been used correctly, or used in the same 
way as the originator, or use in the same kind of structures as the original.

But if I have <dog xmlns=http://www.topologi.com/namespace/rj >  to mean "an element represen
ting 
my dog" you can certainly use it to mean something else. But if you give it to a third-party
, they will 
try to find its meaning at that URLs, not on Arjun's website in the absense of special arran
gement. 

The more that data is provided as a blind service, the less worthwhile divergences from the
original specific semantics will be.  I can put out a web page calling a "table" a "script",
 but
people won't be able to use it.  I think we need to allow for this spectrum of private diver
gence
and public adherence to the originator's semantics when discussing namespaces: W3C standards
in particular are often written with the tacet assumption that they describe what goes on fo
r
the public web, not what goes on behind-the-scenes.  Consequently the world they embody may
be unrecongnizable to someone in the trenches, for example someone working on publishing wit
h
no blind (i.e. you don't know who your customer is) web services.

Cheers
Rick Jelliffe

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