[28 July 2008]

Lately I’ve had occasion to spend some time dereferencing namespaces and looking at what you get when you do so. If, for example, you have encountered some qualified name and want to know what it might mean, the “follow-your-nose” principle says it’s a good idea that you should be able to find out by dereferencing the namespace name. (The follow your nose priniplce introduced to me under that name by Dan Connolly, but I think he’d prefer to think of it as a general principle of Web architecture than as an invention of his own. And indeed the Architecture of the World Wide Web, as documented by the W3C’s Technical Architecture Group, explicitly recommends that namespace documents be provided for all namespaces.)

The upshot of my recent examinations is that for some namespaces, even otherwise exemplary applications and demos fail to provide namespace documents. For others, the only namespace document is a machine-readable document (e.g. an OWL ontology) without any human-comprehensible documentation of what the terms in the namespace are intended to mean; for still others, there is useful human-readable description (sometimes only in a comment, but it’s there) if you can can find it. And for a few, there is something approaching a document intended to be accessible to a human reader.

So far, however, the best namespace document I’ve seen recently is the one produced by the XHTML Working Group for the namespace http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml/vocab — human-readable, and reasonably clear. Not perfect (no document date? no description of whether the vocabulary is subject to change?) but far, far, better than average.

Kudos to the XHTML Working Group!