RE: fragment identifiers

On Fri, 26 Jul 2002, Joshua Allen wrote:

> 
> > > The *web* is about accessing resources.  The *semantic* web is about
> > > *describing* resources, even those which cannot be accessed.
> Describing
> > > does not and should not require accessing.
> > 
> > EARL and Annotea are used to describe resources that must be accessed
> > for the metadata to be meaningful.  That is clearly not obvious to
> 
> Wrong.  The metadata can be created and queried without accessing the
> resource.  The resources themselves are resources which are useful only
> when they are accessed via HTTP GET.  But that is a limitation of the
> resource and the REST model, not a limitation of the metadata.

EARL and Annotea talk about things like "the third paragraph in
a division labelled main in a document at http://xyz/".  Are you
suggesting they should do so without reference to some content
retreived from the URL?

> The concept is even more fundamental to the *semantic* web.  If you must
> do GET on a resource to be able to make assertions about it, you have a
> brittle system that will never scale.

I never said that you had to.  But certain types of assertion can only
be meaningful when referenced to content retrieved - typically by GET.


-- 
Nick Kew