Re: URIs quack like a duck

This is a good example of that philosophy which no one wrote down because
it seemed obvious.


-----Original Message-----
From: David Carlisle <david@dcarlisle.demon.co.uk>

>> Ahhh! You want to make it ILLEGAL to dereference a namespace to anything.
>
>If you dereference the namespace name then without some extra knowledge
>about some special circumstance that you are in, you have no reason to
>suspect that the data returned has anything to do with the namespace.
>
><x xmlns="http://www.dcarlisle.demon.co.uk"/>
>
>is a document containing an element in a namespace named after my home
>page.

No, it is a document conatining an element in a namespace which *is* your
home page!

We have identity. Your home page R1 is identified by u1
="http://www.dcarlisle.demon.co.uk".
The Namespace, R2, is identified by u2 = "http://www.dcarlisle.demon.co.uk".

Therefore, your home page is a namespace.

When I open a port 80 connection to a service registered as
www.dcarlisle.demon.co.uk
and ask for "/" then the meaning is "get me a representation of that
identified by
 www.dcarlisle.demon.co.uk"

Your server seems to give me back a dcoument which is surprising.
It doesn't tell me about any namespace in any language, schema or HTML or
whatever,
so it is a strange representation of a namespace.
And it says it is "David and Joanna Carlisle's Home Page" and carries a link
to something else which decalres itself to be "David Carlisle's Home Page".

So there *is* an expectation that inrunning an HTTP service you are
providing representations of the resources you have named.
As you are I assume the owner of dcarlisle.demon.co.uk
I would take the information on that page you describe as being your
home page as being definitively you home page.

[distracting myself from homesickness for Oxfordshire...]

>The fact that I used that URI to name the namespace in this
>document in no way affects the resource identified by the URI.


Sorry, David, that is not how URIs are used.   You don't ahev to use an http
scheme URI but if you do and you provide a representation of that resource,
you provide a repreentation.

That identified by a URI is a Resource. If you use a URI to name the
namespace then the namespace is the corresponding URI.
That is how URIs identify things.

(If you want a more formal model of URI and HTTP, Dan Connolly has been
working on
one in larch
http://www.w3.org/XML/9711theory/)

>John's proposal was that if you wanted a URI to refer to the namespace
>you could use data:, prepended to the namespace name, which would be
>data:,http://www.dcarlisle.demon.co.uk
>here.


Doesn't work. Said i
>David
>
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Received on Saturday, 3 June 2000 01:20:36 UTC