DocBook 5.0 namespace

[Jirka Kosek <jirka@kosek.cz>]

Hi,

to kick-off discussion about namespace for DocBook 5.0 elements I did 
small survey of namespaces used in other OASIS based XML vocabularies:

--------------------------------------------------------------
OBIX: http://obix.com/ns/module/version

WSBPEL: http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/ws/2004/03/business-process/

UBL: urn:oasis:names:specification:ubl:schema:xsd:DocumentStatusCode-1.0
      urn:oasis:names:specification:ubl:schema:xsd:CommonBasicComponents-1.0
      ...

XACML: urn:oasis:names:tc:xacml:2.0:policy
        urn:oasis:names:tc:xacml:2.0:context

SAML: urn:oasis:names:tc:SAML:2.0:assertion
       urn:oasis:names:tc:SAML:2.0:protocol

CAP: http://www.incident.com/cap/1.0

XLIFF: urn:oasis:names:tc:xliff:document:1.1

DITA: http://dita.oasis-open.org/architecture/2005/

OpenDocument: urn:oasis:names:tc:opendocument:xmlns:office:1.0
	      urn:oasis:names:tc:opendocument:xmlns:meta:1.0

XML catalogs: urn:oasis:names:tc:entity:xmlns:xml:catalog

RELAX NG: http://relaxng.org/ns/structure/1.0
--------------------------------------------------------------

So nothing very uniform. Some languages use URNs, some URLs often 
borrowed from time when specification was developed outside of OASIS.

 From this I suppose we could use namaspace name like 
http://docbook.org/docbook-ng/ which Norm is currently using in his 
prototype implementation.

However I personally don't like URLs as namespaces. It is because I do a 
lot of XML training and for many people it is very hard to get familiar 
with fact that http://something is not referenced and fetched when XML 
document in http://something namespace is processed.

There is RFC that defines structure of URNs for OASIS 
(ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/rfc3121.txt). If we will decide to use URN 
for namespace it should conform to one of the following templates:

urn:oasis:names:specification:{specification-id}
                            :{type}{:subtype}?:{document-id}

urn:oasis:names:tc:{tc-id}:{type}{:subtype}?:{document-id}

where the Director of Technical Operations at OASIS assigns document
types, subtypes, and all unique identifiers.

As DocBook TC doesn't provide more documents for DocBook Specification I 
can imagine omission of document-id. So URN could look like

urn:oasis:names:specification:docbook:xmlns

It will look even more better without trailing xmlns, but it is question 
whether this will be still valid regarding RFC3121.

Alternative approach is to assign URN on TC base, not specification 
base. The we will get somethng like:

urn:oasis:names:tc:docbook:xmlns

Strictly speaking there should be also trainling document-id, but I 
don't think that appending something like docbook-5.0 would be of any 
benefit when we provide versioning using version attribute on the root 
element of document instance.

I hope that this summary will help us to sort out namespace quicker 
during the following TC.

Cheers,

				Jirka

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   Jirka Kosek     e-mail: jirka@kosek.cz     http://www.kosek.cz
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