- From: Joshua Allen <joshuaa@microsoft.com>
- Date: Thu, 9 Sep 2004 14:20:34 -0700
- To: "Norman Walsh" <Norman.Walsh@Sun.COM>, <www-tag@w3.org>
> | http://xmlns.com/wordnet/1.6/Hoary_Marmot is_a "web page" > | > | is wrong. The URI identifies a resource; and the "web page" is a > | _representation_ of the resource. It is not _the_ _resource_. > > No, web pages are a class of resource and I can assert that > http://xmlns.com/wordnet/1.6/Hoary_Marmot is a member of that class. Good point; there is nothing preventing someone from minting new URIs that denote the actual stream of bits returned by an HTTP call. However, I think it's very important to be consistent -- so if people use http: URIs to denote the "resource" rather than the "representation", then they should always do so -- and pick a different convention for denoting the representation. Larry Masinter once proposed the "tdb" scheme to do the converse -- tdb:http://xmlns.com/wordnet/1.6/Hoary_Marmot would denote the actual resource (in this case, a member of class "word"), while http://xmlns.com/wordnet/1.6/Hoary_Marmot would denote the "web page". If I were suggesting conventions, I personally would always say that an http: URI should denote a "resource representation dispenser". IMO this is the only consistent long-term view. But overall, I just think it should be consistent. We should not allow people to use the same URI to alternately denote representation, resource, and representation dispenser. This would be a disaster.
Received on Thursday, 9 September 2004 21:21:07 UTC