Multi-conference report: VO and SW

[roy at cacr.caltech.edu]

Norman

I think this thing that you call out as bad practice was my idea:

"We don't seem to be doing anything that stands out as Bad Practice, with
the possible exception of the proposed ivo: URI scheme."

I would appreciate an elaboration of why it ivo: is bad. It would seem to
me that the prefix http: means Hypertext transfer protocol (that's what I
grew up with anyway), and that our identifiers are definitively NOT that.
I really dislike this practice of making non-URLs look like URLs, it is
confusing.

Therefore I pushed to have a scheme so that it is quite clear that this is
not a URL. In fact, the thing you can do is resolve it with an IVOA
registry and ivo: makes that clear.

Another example is the XML namespace. This is a silly name for it:
http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance. I would suggest that
xmlns://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance would be better.

It reminds me of how Native Americans are sometimes called Indians, which
is immediately followed by an explanation that they are not from India.

Thank you
Roy