Re: Revisiting namespaceDocument-8

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Norman Walsh writes:

> I'm comfortable saying that a namespace name is an information
> resource. Namespaces are a mechanism for disambiguating local names
> and I think anything you could want to express about them, you could
> express in a message.

I'm less comfortable -- I was trying an informal test
to distinguish information resources along the following lines:

  Being an information resource or not is _not_ determined by what its
  *presentation* is _about_ (*depicts* or *describes*).  'Moby Dick'
  is, after all, _about_ a ship, a number of men, a whale. . .  But it
  _is_ a novel by Herman Melville.  The Oaxaca weather report is
  _about_ the weather in Oaxaca, but it _is_ a forecast.  The HTML
  spec is _about_ rendering semantics, markup, ... but it _is_ a
  specification.

  So in a mixture of AWWW-speak and linguistic philosophy, what (an
  information resource) URI *identifies* is distinct from what it's
  _about_.

  Whereas insofar as (on the httpRange-14 'resolution' view) I
  understand the situation, if you can retrieve (via the 303 route)
  something from a non-information resource URI, what you get _does_
  describe/depict the very thing that the resource identifies.

  So for instance, presuming he moved the page and installed the
  redirect, http://www.ihmc.us/users/phayes/PatHayes.html both
  identifies and describes Pat himself.

But on that account a namespace URI is pretty clearly _not_ an
information resource. . .

I don't (yet) find "exhaustably expressible in a message" a very
useful test -- consider e.g. the number three -- I'm pretty sure I
could give a pretty thorough expression of what 'three' is all about
in a message. . .

ht
- -- 
 Henry S. Thompson, HCRC Language Technology Group, University of Edinburgh
                     Half-time member of W3C Team
    2 Buccleuch Place, Edinburgh EH8 9LW, SCOTLAND -- (44) 131 650-4440
            Fax: (44) 131 650-4587, e-mail: ht@inf.ed.ac.uk
                   URL: http://www.ltg.ed.ac.uk/~ht/
[mail really from me _always_ has this .sig -- mail without it is forged spam]

- -- 
 Henry S. Thompson, HCRC Language Technology Group, University of Edinburgh
                     Half-time member of W3C Team
    2 Buccleuch Place, Edinburgh EH8 9LW, SCOTLAND -- (44) 131 650-4440
            Fax: (44) 131 650-4587, e-mail: ht@inf.ed.ac.uk
                   URL: http://www.ltg.ed.ac.uk/~ht/
[mail really from me _always_ has this .sig -- mail without it is forged spam]
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Received on Tuesday, 28 June 2005 17:22:48 UTC