RE: Resources and URIs

> -----Original Message-----
> From: ext Larry Masinter [mailto:LMM@acm.org]
> Sent: 08 May, 2003 23:37
> To: Stickler Patrick (NMP/Tampere); sandro@w3.org
> Cc: uri@w3.org
> Subject: RE: Resources and URIs 
> 
> 
> 
> # 5. Any RDF statements using http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml as the
> subject
> #    describe the XHTML vocabulary.
> 
> # 6. Any RDF statements using http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml.html as the
> subject
> #    describe the web page.
> 
> I don't think it's a good idea to have the 'meaning' of RDF
> statements depend on the spelling of the last part of the URL used.
> So I think this is a really bad design.

Er. Who says spelling has anything to do with it?

I simply indicated that there are two URIs. One appears to denote
a vocabulary and the other appears to denote a representation of
that vocabulary. Any mnemmonic similarity between the URIs is
irrelevant. I was not deducing meaning from the mnemmonics of
the URI strings, but from server behavior (which is not any
more reliable for making such determinations, I must confess ;-)

Ideally, authoritative knowledge would be available from the server
which would help clarify the nature of the resources denoted by the
URIs in question, and their relationships, if any.

> I think there's some tendency to pay attention to the 'file extension'
> in a URL as some kind of meta-data, and that this isn't portable
> or platform independent. We might want to work on some policy about
> this, since there seem to be a number of clients that do auto-detect
> of file format based on the URL 'extension' for more than just 'ftp:'
> (where it's necessary).

I agree with you that ideally the URIs should be treated as opaque
and even conneg should not necessarily muck about with suffixation
(even though it has been a fairly workable approach to date).

But my examples do not presume any such relation between the URIs
indicated.
 
Cheers,

Patrick