[Bug 1974] Our published names for datatypes etc. don't resolve

https://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=1974

--- Comment #10 from C. M. Sperberg-McQueen <cmsmcq@blackmesatech.com> 2012-02-15 19:58:23 UTC ---
If a statement from the owner of a namespace NS that a particular name N in
that namespace names a particular thing T does not suffice to make it the case
that name N in namespace NS names thing T, then what kind of action can make it
the case?

Perhaps I have always misunderstood the nature of the problem leading to this
bug report:  I thought the problem was that people who wanted to know what a
given URI denotes should be able to dereference that URI and find some
human-readable (and perhaps also some machine-processable) information that
helps them understand the denotation of the URI, and our namespace document
doesn't do an acceptable job of helping either humans or machines understand
the URIs which denote the built-in datatypes and the other things in the XSD
namespace.  But that understanding centers on the quality of the human- and
machine-readable documentation for those URIs, not on a conflation of datatypes
with HTML elements.

If  the plan described in comment 6 is no good because HTML elements are not
datatypes, then how is any namespace owner to document the namespace?  The only
URIs whose meaning can conveniently be explained by means of a human-readable
HTML element would then appear to be URIs denoting elements in HTML documents
-- an interesting but not exhaustive subclass of URIs.

One commonly held view is that what is delivered when a URI is dereferenced is
a representation of the resource, not necessarily the resource itself.  On that
view, the idea of providing an HTML document describing the resource denoted
(here, an HTML element describing the datatype denoted by a URI) is both
coherent and desirable, and does not give rise to the erroneous conclusion that
the resource denoted by the URI is an HTML document or element.  Can anyone
explain in words of one syllable what is wrong with that commonly held view
that makes it necessary to change course on this issue?

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Received on Wednesday, 15 February 2012 19:58:32 UTC