Use of w3.org servers.

Wed Aug 6 16:36:46 UTC 2003

On Wed, Aug 06, 2003 at 05:31:00PM +0100, Ceri Davies wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 06, 2003 at 09:01:38AM -0700, Gary W. Swearingen wrote:
> > early-adopter.html (at least) on www.freebsd.org has
> >        <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
> > 
> > I seem to recall reading that W3 prefers that people serve their own
> > copies of that stuff instead of sponging off the W3 servers a lot.
> 
> In this case, that's not relevant, for a number of reasons.
> 
> Firstly, the namespace declaration is inserted by W3's tidy application.
> 
> Secondly, URIs in XML namespaces aren't required to point at anything, so
> nothing should be accessing the URI above as a result of this entry.
> 
> Having said that, changing this to our own namespace wouldn't harm anything,
> but if it really is inserted by tidy, as I believe is the case, then I don't
> know an easy way to change it (which is not to say that there isn't one).

Actually, we don't *want* to change it, because otherwise browsers
would not really understand that we are serving them XHTML, and might
have all kinds of trouble displaying it.  The namespace declaration
serves to identify the type of the XML element to which it applies,
i.e. just what kind of information is encoded within it.  The above
namespace declaration identifies the <html> element and all its contents
(or at least, all its elements that do not have a *different*
namespace declaration) to be XHTML, and browsers know how to render it.

Besides, as Ceri says, there's no harm, as nothing should *ever* be
accessing the w3.org URL; namespaces are *not* guaranteed to contain
URL's with valid content, and they are not even guaranteed to contain
valid URL's.  A namespace may be any sequence of characters; it is
customary to use URL's for easy identification and versioning, but
it is just that - a custom.  Anyway, don't change it, or people will
not be able to see our pages :)

G'luck,
Peter

-- 
Peter Pentchev	roam at ringlet.net    roam at sbnd.net    roam at FreeBSD.org
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If wishes were fishes, the antecedent of this conditional would be true.
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