Effective XML: 50 Specific Ways to Improve Your XML

Item 42. Document Namespaces with RDDL

All the warnings in the namespace specification that there is not necessarily anything at the end of a namespace URL have not stopped people from typing namespace URLs into their browser location bars and clicking the Go button. If you don't want your error logs filling up with requests for nonexistent documents, you need to put something there. The right thing to put there is a Resource Directory Description Language (RDDL) document. This provides human-readable XHTML documentation for people and machine-readable XLinks for software.

For example, consider the MegaBank Statement Markup Language (MBSML) introduced in Item 5. This was specified as being in the namespace http://namespaces.megabank.com/statement. ...