Re: Preferable alternative to 'resource'

Pat Hayes writes:

> Until quite recently, and everywhere except for a few of the more 
> recherche TAG writings, "resource" in most of this literature in fact 
> means "information resource". And keeping "resource" as an 
> abbreviation for IR seems quite sensible, and conforms to natural 
> English usage and to historical precedents.

Interesting point.  That might work.

> URI could be glossed as Uniform Rigid Identifier, which in fact is 
> quite a good description of its intended use.

Umm, please take no offense, but that seems a bit clunky and forced. Right 
now, I think we should either stick with the current broad meaning for 
"Resource", or adopt a new initialism.  It's not clear to me that anyone 
outside the priesthood has even noticed the URL->URI transition, so maybe 
yet more confusion only makes it a little worse?

> With respect to IBM, 150 IBMers is a pretty small group compared to 
> the entire rest of the planet.

Yes, of course.  The question is whether my little experience is 
representative of many others?  Overall, there's a tremendous investment 
in teaching people about the Web and how to use it.  How much of that is 
at a level of specificity that would be affected by the changes of 
terminology we're contemplating, I'm not sure.  I'm just offering one 
datapoint, not drawing any conclusions.

Noah

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Noah Mendelsohn 
IBM Corporation
One Rogers Street
Cambridge, MA 02142
1-617-693-4036
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