- From: Mark Baker <distobj@acm.org>
- Date: Wed, 3 Jul 2002 14:46:42 -0400
- To: Patrick Stickler <patrick.stickler@nokia.com>
- Cc: WWW TAG <www-tag@w3.org>
On Wed, Jul 03, 2002 at 05:03:02PM +0300, Patrick Stickler wrote: > Thus, using a mailto: URL to denote a person, or using a web > page URL to denote a company, or using a namespace > URI to denote both the set of terms and some document > describing things related to that set of terms are all errors. May I respectfully suggest that folks address this point of Patrick's? IMO, this is an *extremely* common misconception, and it appears to underly his entire argument. Patrick believes that a URI should only identify one thing. This is absolutely true, and I don't think anybody here would disagree. He also believes that the bytes returned in response to a GET are necessarily identified by that same URI. This is not true. For most GETs, it is the case that there are *two* resources being used; the one on the HTTP request line (GET <some-uri>), and the one whose content is returned as a bytestream representing the state of the other. HTTP 1.1 provides the Content-Location header to distinguish between the two; its value is the URI of the latter resource. If Content-Location is not present, then there is an ambiguity. But as with all identifiers, what they identify is determined by use, not by edict. And invariably (I've yet to see a counter case), use decides to identify the abstract thing, not the content. To demonstrate this, pick any URI, do a "backwards links" search from Google on it, and then take a look to see the context in which its used. (but note that Google has some nasty heuristics. For example, it assumes that http://www.yahoo.com/ and http://www.yahoo.com/index.html identify the same resource). MB -- Mark Baker, CTO, Idokorro Mobile (formerly Planetfred) Ottawa, Ontario, CANADA. distobj@acm.org http://www.markbaker.ca http://www.idokorro.com
Received on Wednesday, 3 July 2002 14:35:46 UTC