greystate namespaces

Greystate Namespaces

This is the source code for the site at https://xmlns.greystate.dk/ where I've hosted the schemas for some of my XML applications for a long time.

XMLSchemas are XML documents but can be quite difficult to "read", so I figured I could "extract" the human-understandable parts by rendering them a little simpler.

That's what the website does — If you peek through the code you'll probably discover a couple of things:

• It seems to have originated around April 2002
• It's written in Microsoft's JScript ASP variant
• The schemas are transformed to HTML using XSLT, because, of course
• The transformations are done using another legacy project of mine, XMLObject()
• It's using my Server.Transfer() trick to hide the .asp part of the URLs, but keeping the logic in a single file (process.asp).
• I was using a source code control system called RCS at the time

Why are all the namespace URIs using HTTP when the site is running on HTTPS?

This is the beauty of the way namespace URIs have always been specified - there does not have to be a resource at the URI - it just has to be unique (within the scope it's supposed to be used).

This means that while I've decided to put a representation of them on their respective URLs (the HTTP version works fine as well - I'm not currently redirecting them), I can use HTTPS without breaking any applications that use them.

Let me know if there's something you'd like me to explain further - I might still remember :D

/Chriztian, December 2020