In this essay Tim Bray presents a case for a general solution to related-resource discovery for XML. Such a solution would enable consistent schemes of access to schemas, stylesheets or metadata.

The need for such a solution has been brought to the fore recently in discussions over namespaces and XHTML, in which one of the key questions being asked was "Does a namespace URI determine a schema for that namespace?". The answer, according to the intentions of the XML Working Group, is "No", but the fact remains that it is very desirable to be able to discover the schemas associated with a document.

Tim Bray's essay, intended to present this issue to the XML Plenary group (the set of all members of all W3C working groups on XML) this week, extends the question beyond just schemas, to call for a generalized solution for all related resources.

Update: see this story for comments from Tim Berners-Lee, the director of the W3C, on the namespace-URI correspondence issue. (28 Sep 1999)