Re: A little courtesy, please

At 05:13 AM 5/23/00 -0400, Tim Berners-Lee wrote:

>>I am growing increasingly short-tempered at some of the shabby rhetoric
>>being used in this debate
>
>If this general complaint was prompted at all by my Goedel-Escher Bach

Nope.  I was using "rhetoric" in the formal sense - prose designed to
convince the reader/listener of some point of view - and complaining about
rhetorical techniques which claim not only that point of view X is wrong,
but that belief in X is evidence that its proponents are against URIs, 
against relative URIs, against RDF, etc etc; all allegations that have been
made explicitly and in some cases repeatedly.  Maybe I'm losing perspective 
on this; all I can do is report empirically that this tactic is severely 
irritating and not helpful in looking for the solution to a hard problem. 
 -Tim