Re: Clarifying what a URL identifies (Four Uses of a URL)

Tim Bray wrote,
> The reason I'm willing to put so much energy into this is that I
> agonized for a long time over the fact that in reality URIs identify
> lots of different kinds of things and everybody was ignoring this
> elephant in the room.  Weirdly enough, this angst never got in the
> way of my building spiders and search engines and visual maps of
> webspace and all sorts of other useful things.  It is quite possible
> that the Web Architecture works *because* it works around the
> intractable problems of meaning and only deals with comparing
> identifiers and shuffling representations around; avoiding a lot of
> problems that historically have been intractable.

s/Web Architecture/web/ and I'd agree.

Pragmatism is all very well if what you want is running code. But the 
Web Architecture document isn't running code, and if it punts on this 
issue that'd pretty much be an admission that there's an incoherent 
mess at the core.

But, as you say, people would keep on cutting code, and things would 
keep on working.

Maybe you've just made an argument for a Web Architecture document not 
being needed at all.

Cheers,


Miles

Received on Tuesday, 21 January 2003 18:49:56 UTC