- From: Bob Morris <morris.bob@gmail.com>
- Date: Thu, 9 Aug 2012 15:30:22 -0400
- To: Robert Sanderson <azaroth42@gmail.com>
- Cc: public-openannotation <public-openannotation@w3.org>
On Thu, Aug 9, 2012 at 1:20 PM, Robert Sanderson <azaroth42@gmail.com> wrote: > Hi Bob, > > [...] > > I agree that according to the wording of RFC 3986, I am conflating > resolution and dereferencing in the current specification text. If > you'd like to suggest a clearer way to express it, I'm happy to adjust > the wording :) > Short: Stick with dereference. Long: As a recovering algebraist, I have a fetish for terminological precision. However, I am at peace with myself over the fact that almost everybody uses one or the other when they mean both. Including me. Furthermore, it's almost always possible from the context when people mean both and/or don't need to care about the difference. So I tend to use both mainly in discourse only where it actually matters which one I am talking about. Except among implementors, most discussion is about the information returned by dereferencing, not about how it was obtained. Also, whereas resolution (resp resolvable) without dereferencing (resp deferencable) are meaningful, the converse is not. Putting this all together, I favor dereferencing as the default usage even when "resolution and dereferencing" is meant. All that said, if we get to the step of developing a W3C Recommendation, it will surprise me a little if we will be allowed to be sloppy on such points involving terminology constrained in other W3C Recommendations, at least not without a warning in an introduction. I'd particularly expect to see such pickiness arise on usage in normative sentences. Bob Robert A. Morris Emeritus Professor of Computer Science UMASS-Boston 100 Morrissey Blvd Boston, MA 02125-3390 IT Staff Filtered Push Project Harvard University Herbaria Harvard University email: morris.bob@gmail.com web: http://efg.cs.umb.edu/ web: http://etaxonomy.org/mw/FilteredPush http://www.cs.umb.edu/~ram === The content of this communication is made entirely on my own behalf and in no way should be deemed to express official positions of The University of Massachusetts at Boston or Harvard University.
Received on Thursday, 9 August 2012 19:30:50 UTC