[geeklog-devel] Namespaces

[Dirk Haun]

Here's a small aspect of the webservices API that needs some thought as
it could also be of interest for other areas in both Geeklog 1 and 2:

We're using a namespace "gl" to mark any Geeklog-specific extensions to
be transported over the Atom Publishing Protcol. The URI for that
namespace currently is defined as http://www.geeklog.net

Now it's apparently common practice to have the URI for a namespace to
point to some form of documentation about the namespace, terse as it may
be. For example, the URI for Atompub's "app" namespace points to <http://
www.w3.org/2007/app> which is a very minimal page with pointers to more
information.

I don't think the Geeklog extensions are of any interest outside of the
Geeklog community, so we can probably keep this on geeklog.net (instead
of, say, getting a permanent URL at purl.org).

We should put some thought into the URL scheme so that we can add other
namespaces (and possibly other specifications) there as well. For
example, we may want to define modules for RSS or Atom feeds and I can
imagine that Geeklog 2 may also have some need for namespaces or similar
information.

The W3C uses a year-based scheme (see above) but that is probably
overkill for us.

So what would be a good URL scheme for our use? Some thoughts:

- Choose a subdirectory that's not likely to be used by Geeklog itself.
Make it a neutral name, so that it can be used for things other than
namespaces.
- Below that, have a subdirectory for the protocol we use, e.g. "rss",
"app", etc.
- Do we need a version number?

So for the Atompub namespace we could have something like

    http://www.geeklog.net/purl/app/
or  http://www.geeklog.net/purl/app/1.0/

Comments? Thoughts? Has anyone been through some design decisions like
these before?

I guess in the end it doesn't really matter that much and we don't need
to spec it out to every last detail. Just want to make sure we're not
making any obvious mistakes ...

bye, Dirk


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