Raging Battle

A cease-fire, not a solution

Relative URIs lead to more difficult problems Apart from the changing-URI problem, issues involving potential resolution of URIs emerged. It quickly became clear that some participants wanted namespace URIs to point to XML Schemas, while others found that too restrictive, locking out more flexible possibilities.
Comparison as strings or as URIs? Although Namespaces in XML describes the values of xmlns attributes as URI references, it specifies character-by-character string comparison for namespace processing.
Deprecation as last resort Although it doesn't resolve any of the underlying issues, 1800 public messages on XML-URI (on top of many private messages) hadn't led to a more sophisticated consensus, so the W3C announced that relative URIs are deprecated.