moving spec from http://unhosted.org/spec/... to http://w3.org/ns/...
Michiel de Jong
we talked about the w3c thing on irc as well. i think we should leave everything as it is (mailing list, irc channel, ...), except for the namespace url of our spec. so version 0.2, which we'll switch to next month, would have a namespace starting http://w3.org/ns/... instead of http://unhosted.org/spec/...
For most situations this wouldn't change anything. we interact with projects like ownCloud, CouchDb, diaspora, wordpress, statusnet, who will look at a standard for its merit and not for its political correctness. i think even a project like OpenStack would be willing to accept our patches, regardless of whether we're official. but for instance amazon s3 storage or GoogleDocs storage would probably want to know that what they're adhering to is a 'real proper legit' standard. also for government organizations like universities, i think the w3c stamp points the direction. as explained in http://www.w3.org/community/about/faq/# it wouldn't make our standard a draft standard, but it would allow us to start using their namespace, and with that, indicate an intention of entering in a w3c standard proposal track next year.
we could also use other standards bodies like ietf, oasis, owf, whatwg. we could even "dual body" our standard for all i care. :) but i think w3c is nice, and sounds good, and we have an easy way to roll into it now by starting to use their domain name as a namespace. Let me know if you think this is a wrong decision.
cheers!
Michiel.
Dan Brickley
On 6 September 2011 10:01, Michiel de Jong <mic...@unhosted.org> wrote:
> we talked about the w3c thing on irc as well. i think we should leave
> everything as it is (mailing list, irc channel, ...), except for the
> namespace url of our spec. so version 0.2, which we'll switch to next month,
> would have a namespace starting http://w3.org/ns/... instead of
> http://unhosted.org/spec/...
Just to unlurk for a minute, and comment on namespace design.
Some time in early 2000, in the FOAF project, we started using
'http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/' as the namespace for the FOAF RDF
vocabulary. Thinking that it was good to be explicit about version
numbers, ... and that this was still a project in its early stages.
What we quickly found (and this may make sense for RDF vocabs more
than other situations) is that the cost of changing the namespace to a
different (e.g. /foaf/1.0/) soon became prohibitively high. So instead
we have versioned the thing in-place, and give version numbers to the
specs that talk about the namespace even while --- eleven years later
-- still using 'http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/'. The '0.x' is frustrating
but there was never a right time to change, and now millions of files
use it.
If you're planning to change the namespace anyway, I'd encourage you
to strip out any "0.x" structure. Go crazy, call it '1', and the next
version '2', ...etc. After all, it is the first version. And you never
know when you'll find yourself in a situation where changing those
URIs has become too expensive and you get 'stuck'.
In general, it's much more common to regret having included some
characters in a namespace URI, than to regret having ommitted them.
Again, at least for RDF vocabularies. I've not dug deeply enough into
Unhosted yet to be sure if this counts for you.
> For most situations this wouldn't change anything. we interact with projects
> like ownCloud, CouchDb, diaspora, wordpress, statusnet, who will look at a
> standard for its merit and not for its political correctness. i think even a
> project like OpenStack would be willing to accept our patches, regardless of
> whether we're official. but for instance amazon s3 storage or GoogleDocs
> storage would probably want to know that what they're adhering to is a 'real
> proper legit' standard. also for government organizations like universities,
> i think the w3c stamp points the direction. as explained in
> http://www.w3.org/community/about/faq/# it wouldn't make our standard a
> draft standard, but it would allow us to start using their namespace, and
> with that, indicate an intention of entering in a w3c standard proposal
> track next year.
>
> we could also use other standards bodies like ietf, oasis, owf, whatwg. we
> could even "dual body" our standard for all i care. :) but i think w3c is
> nice, and sounds good, and we have an easy way to roll into it now by
> starting to use their domain name as a namespace. Let me know if you think
> this is a wrong decision.
W3C's community groups mechanism is a good thing, and I'm glad to see
Unhosted there...
cheers,
Dan