Re: TAG request: establish the relationship between URIs and Resources is many to many

To say that something is a URI indicates that it conforms to everything 
indicated in trhe URI spec, syntax and semantics.  This doesn't 
normally need to be said. If I send you
an RFC822 mail message, or an HTML4.0 file, this doesn't  mean I am
just sending you something syntactically constrained.



On Monday, Jan 27, 2003, at 00:50 US/Eastern, David Booth wrote:

> TimBL,
>
> TimBL wrote in 
> http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-tag/2003Jan/0330.html :
>
>> On Thursday, Jan 23, 2003, at 07:24 US/Eastern, Bill de hÓra wrote:
>> > . . . However I believe the notion that a URI only ever identifies
>> > one thing, however appealing, is fictitious, . . . .
>>
>> I disagree.  . . .  The web works because
>> when you make a link you assume that the URI which the publisher of
>> the target document gave you will, anywhere in the world,
>> identify the same web page. You quote the URI, and it stands for the
>> page.
>
> It's unclear whether you're talking about a string that conforms to 
> the *syntax* of a URI (as specified in RFC2396) or a string that 
> conforms to the *semantics* of RFC2396 (where "conforming to the 
> semantics" of RFC2396 means that the string denotes one particular 
> thing).
>
> It sounds to me like Bill is saying that
>
>         http://x.org/MyCar
>
> might mean the car in one context or language, and the picture of the 
> car in another, which will always be true, because you *always* have 
> to know the language in order to determine the meaning of *any* 
> statement.
>
> So it sounds to me like Bill is talking about a string that conforms 
> to the *syntax* of an RFC2396 URI, while you are talking about a 
> string that conforms to the syntax *and* (what you believe to be) the 
> semantics of an RFC2396 URI.
>
> Is that correct?
>
>
> -- 
> David Booth
> W3C Fellow / Hewlett-Packard
> Telephone: +1.617.253.1273