James Clark is pushing an astute proposal previously supported by John Cowan, David Carlisle and Larry Masinter which might be an acceptable compromise for the different parties.

Noting that "I've been quite surprised to find that this debate has actually changed my views", James Clark heartily explained why the "fixed base" proposal "to absolutize namespace names relative to a fixed base URI of something like 'contextdependent:/' and then perform a character-for-character comparison" might an acceptable proposal for all the protagonists:

The effect of "fixed base" is very similar to the "literal" solution; except for URIs containing "." and ".." it will be the same. However, it avoids the key problem of the "literal" approach: with "fixed base" there's never a case where two URIs are namespace equal but refer to different resources; thus an application such as RDF that needs to dereference namespace URIs can be consistently layered on top of "fixed base". It also avoids the key problem with the "deprecate" solution, which is to specify what happens when documents use relative namespace URIs despite their being deprecated.

Except for the issue voiced by Daniel Veillard and more loudly by Dan Connolly that this wouldn't be coherent with base URIs, this proposal seems to be very consensual so far.

James Clark has answered to this issue to demonstrate that the other alternatives had even worse drawbacks and would all be unacceptable by their opponents.