It seems fundamentally important for a distributed shared memory system of any kind to have some form of global object ID. There is a fundamental need to have an identified, universal name for each and every object in the system that allows one to refer directly to another object and embed references in order to build structured data. The question for the NODAL design is whether we need a within-repository global ID, or whether some other mechanism is adequate?
This paper is the presentation of the results of a series of workshops to develop consensus framework specifications for hypertext systems in 1988 and 1989. In the course of this work they developed both vocabulary, system architecture and a formal specification (in Z) of the semantics of the modules. In this review, I will concentrate primarily on the vocabulary and system architecture and my views on how this has affected modern hypertext systems and other implications in the current context.
There has often been confusion in the XML community about the relationships between names, namespaces and the binding of values. The confusion arises from a common understanding that a name is used as an identifier for some thing, in essence it is an association between an identifier and an object. Unfortunately, this is simply not what an XML name is. It is only the identifier. As a datatype, it is a constrained-format, immutable character string that is usable as an identifier only. Since we prefer short identifiers, namespaces were introduced as a way of providing a context for these identifiers (i.e. the same name can have different significance in different contexts). XML treats the binding of names to values as a completely separate phenomenon.