Schema repo presentation

[Mark Taylor]

Markus et al.,

this namespace business is fundamentally confusing, and I applaud
you for trying to address that.  My personal feeling though is that
this proposed fix is not likely to prevent confusion enough to make
it worth the the additional visual complication on the schemas page.

Two main reasons:

  - People probably aren't going to go looking on that page for
    these namespaces.  If they find themselves at https://ivoa.net/xml/
    and don't already know about the namespacing dragons,
    they will probably just click through to the XSD they're after
    rather than making character-by-character examination of the
    namespacey URI nearby (at least, that's what I'd do).

  - The namespace applies to some, though not all, of the versions
    listed in the entry it appears near to.  Your example lists:

       VOEvent: v2.0 v1.1 v1.0 		  	 
       Target Namespace: http://www.ivoa.net/xml/VOEvent/v2.0

    so the namespace applies to one of those entries (v2.0) but not
    to the other two (v1.1, v1.0).  Although the most recent is likely
    the one that readers will be using, that mismatch at least
    obscures the meaning.

Do I have any better ideas?  Nothing I'm confident will stop this
being ground for wide confusion, but FWIW:

  - If we go ahead with this change, I'd colour-code the namespace
    URI (green) so it's clear (to non-colourblind readers) that it's
    the current schema version it applies to.

  - Or maybe just add a banner at the top of the table saying
    "Be careful of namespaces - see the XMLVers document for details"

Mark


On Fri, 5 Feb 2021, Markus Demleitner wrote:

> Dear Colleagues,
> 
> Again I'm defaulting to this list for lack of more pertinent ones.
> 
> This is about the schema repository, https://ivoa.net/xml/index.html,
> and is triggered by recurring confusion about our namespace URIs,
> as it most recently re-surfaced in
> http://mail.ivoa.net/pipermail/registry/2021-February/005449.html.
> 
> I think we can significantly reduce it by fixing the presentation in
> the schema repo.
> 
> You see, with our Schema Versioning Policies (and by necessity),
> https://ivoa.net/documents/Notes/XMLVers/20180529, these schemas now
> have fixed namespace URIs independent of minor versions.  Our current
> presentation, on the other hand, stresses these minor versions, which
> I think is what entices people to fudge these namespace URIs, in
> particular because most of them regrettably contain minor versions.
> 
> So, I'd suggest to very visibly include the namespace URIs in the
> repo table.
> 
> Unfortunately, pleasant layouts with URIs in them are usually a bit
> of a challenge, because the URIs tend to be long.  The least ugly
> version I can come up with would be as for the first three items in
> http://docs.g-vo.org/schema-index-draft.html (note that the links in
> there are all broken).
> 
> The effort would be relatively moderate: Add a style
> 
>   tr.tns td {
> 	  padding-bottom:1ex;
> 	  padding-left:3em;
> 	  border-bottom: 1pt solid #ccc;
> 	  font-style: italic;
>   }
> 
> -- and then below each schema row a
> 
>   <tr class="tns"><td colspan="2">
>     Target Namespace: http://www.ivoa.net/xml/VOSICapabilities/v1.0</td></tr>
> 
> I'd even volunteer to do the necessary edits.
> 
> Opinions?
> 
> Thanks,
> 
>          Markus
> 

--
Mark Taylor  Astronomical Programmer  Physics, Bristol University, UK
m.b.taylor at bristol.ac.uk          http://www.star.bristol.ac.uk/~mbt/