Dan Connolly announced a decision of the XML Plenary "to deprecate the use of relative URI references
in namespace declarations."
While the use of relative URI references in namespace declarations isn't outright banned, and the announcement acknowledges that "they conform to the Namespace Recommendation of January 1999," the W3C is not going to support them:
"later specifications such as DOM, XPath, etc. will
define no interpretation for them."
The decision brings to an end months of wrangling which produced approximately 1700 messages on the xml-uri@w3.org mailing list.
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