RE: referendum on httpRange-14

> I stand by my assertion. I've seen no evidence that suggests (to me)
> that further discussion will lead to consensus. Some people believe X
> because they've thought about it a lot and reached the conclusion that
> X is true. Other people believe Y because they've thought about it a
> lot and reached the conclusion that Y is true. X and Y are not
> compatible. Life is hard.

X allows for cases that need Y to be true, Y breaks cases that need X to be
true (eh, arbitrarily assigning to X and Y).

> |> | So from a process perspective, having Information 
> Resource defined
> |> | turns httpRange-14 into pretty much a Yes or No 
> question, although I'm
> |> 
> |> I think httpRange-14 is a yes or no question no matter how 
> you define
> |> (or even if you bother to define) information resource. 
> The answer is:
> |> the community does not agree on what the answer is.
> |
> | I dare say the question has never been put to "the community" in a
> | coherent way.

The only meaningful definitions of "the community" I can think of is either
the set of people who already debate this (whether here or in pub
discussions about what gets mentioned here) or else as a group of web users
large enough that it also contains some provably false concepts of URIs.

> 
> Well, it's sure had a lot of discussion in a lot of places.
> 
> |   Something like this:
> |
> |      Try to imagine that each working HTTP URL is the name of some
> |      particular conceptual entity.  Some of these entities 
> may be easy
> |      to conceptualize, such as a blog or price list, while 
> others may
> |      be less obvious.  (What exactly does "http://www.google.com" or
> |      "http://www.uroulette.com/visit"[1] name?)

Or http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/mbox_sha1sum which while it's interestingly
used in a way that avoids the httpRange-14 issue is itself a URI that is
identifying something that is hard to think of as a document, "conceptual"
or otherwise, as of course are all other RDF predicates and classes.

Regards,
Jon Hanna
<http://www.selkieweb.com/>

Received on Tuesday, 19 October 2004 01:20:08 UTC