Is disambiguation really necessary? (was Is 303 really necessary?)

/agree with Tore.  I know it's an old debate, but it's payback time for 
flooding my inbox for the last week.

Can someone please give me a good use case for pedantically 
disambiguating an IR and NIR?  This week I've seen the following samples:

"/toucan.rdf is wrong".  Why are you declaring a document wrong?  Which 
part of the document at what point in time?  Why don't you just say what 
you think is right?

"ian owns /toucan.rdf".  Why are you saying this?  Are you being lazy 
and really mean "ian makes statement X about a toucan"?

"/toucan.rdf was last updated...".  Who cares, this rdf only exists 
because he isn't allowed to 200 an rdf on /toucan.  And why would you 
say /toucan was updated?  Does this make life easier for your simpleton 
web crawler/indexer?  Don't you mean "On monday ian made statement X, 
but on tuesday he made statement Y"?

"/toucan.rdf has a page rank of..."  Who cares that google ranks 
anything served over http, this statement is meaningless for a toucan or 
it's representation.

Did we really add a whole layer of suck just to make life easier for a 
tiny set of questionably useful document-oriented applications?  Maybe 
those apps should focus on .html URIs instead of toucans.

We have enough trouble solving true identity problems as David's paper 
points out, why add more inane ones?  It definitely killed my motivation 
to try and fix real ambiguity at openguid.  Not that anyone cares, but I 
use conneg to respond with "200 STFU" in rdf/html/etc.  And you can't 
complain about my content because it doesn't have unique identifier.  HA!

Jason

Received on Thursday, 11 November 2010 19:47:16 UTC