> 5) People SHOULD NOT use http: URIs to refer to things like cars > 6) If they do, there is no guarantee that their metadata will be able to participate in the semantic web. Does anybody here really believe that there are things that a string cannot identify? URIs are no special in this respect. Saying that some URI can identify cars, while others cannot, is like saying that words beginning with "h" cannot be used to identify a car. What makes one URI scheme more or less suitable for identifying different types of things is the ability of its application semantics to help establish the publisher's identity assertion in common use. For example, I could assert that ftp://www.markbaker.ca/index.html identifies me, but because FTP's application semantics don't allow the difference between the index.html file and the resource identified by the file to be communicated, people and machines will have problems distinguishing between the two. Why the HTTP URI scheme is special is because the application semantics of HTTP were designed to be able to be used with *all* URI, not one particular scheme. MB -- Mark Baker, Chief Science Officer, Planetfred, Inc. Ottawa, Ontario, CANADA. mbaker@planetfred.com http://www.markbaker.ca http://www.planetfred.comReceived on Monday, 29 April 2002 07:59:42 GMT
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.2.0+W3C-0.50 : Monday, 23 April 2007 18:19:59 GMT