[mapserver-dev] Use of XML namespace URIs in MapServer

[Daniel Morissette]

Ticket http://trac.osgeo.org/mapserver/ticket/3142 raises an issue about 
the default namespace URI used by MapServer which is currently 
http://mapserver.gis.umn.edu/mapserver and apparently this breaks some 
apps because this URL does not resolve to anything. Docs about XML seem 
to say that the namespace URI does not absolutely have to resolve to 
anything, so we are still waiting to hear from the reporter which apps 
that breaks.

Regardless, I thought we could simply change the default to 
http://www.mapserver.org/mapserver but Tom wrote that some parsers rely 
on the namespace value and this could cause a backwards compatibility 
issue.

To avoid bloating the ticket with a long discussion we decided to move 
it here to try to come up with a plan for resolution for the next beta 
(next week).

Here are a my questions/concerns:

- I'd be interested to hear more from XML gurus about the real impact of 
changing the default namespace URI from 
http://mapserver.gis.umn.edu/mapserver to
http://www.mapserver.org/mapserver, even if it's just for consistency 
with our current Internet domain name.

- While checking docs on namespaces a bit, I saw several examples that 
seem to use a different/unique URL path for different XML schemas. 
Should we not do the same, e.g. http://www.mapserver.org/wms, 
http://www.mapserver.org/xmlmapfile, etc?

Daniel
-- 
Daniel Morissette
http://www.mapgears.com/