>For the benefit of some of the slower members of this list, would
>someone define the term 'namespace' please?
We have all been using namespaces for some time in writing
Dublin Core metadata, but without using that term.
The "DC." part in "DC.Title" is a mechanism for avoiding
name clashes in metadata elements. If all Dublin Core
elements start with "DC.", it lessens the danger that some
other organisation will invent an element which happens to
have the same full name as one of ours. This is what we call
a namespace mechanism.
The names DC.Title and ABC.Title don't clash, because the
two 'Title's are in different namespaces (the DC namespace
and the ABC namespace). It's like putting two files with
the same name in different directories.
The snag with this is that someone may invent, say, a
Distributed Computing namespace...
The World Wide Web Consortium's XML Working Group is
therefore working on a more sophisticated mechanism, which
Misha showed in his examples. In this mechanism, URLs
are used to make the names really unique. This is easier
than setting up a registry of namespaces.
Charles [log in to unmask]
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