Re: TWO PROPOSALs involving Prefer - volunteering for the army -> ldp:index PROPOSAL

On 3/1/14 4:23 AM, henry.story@bblfish.net wrote:
> But the rules are not excessive. The rule is that the client understand the meaning of the membership triples that will be added as a consequence of the POST. It can gain this understanding by asking a human agent of course (as browsers currently do on an html form), or the client can be specialised on specific vocabularies, ( a meeting organiser for example ), or it can work with relations that are well understood to have little dangerous implications, such as ldp:contains. And since there exists an ldp:BasicContainer that clients can work with without danger, those that do not wish to take risks should use only that.

It's impractical, to expect this of Web clients. Yes, RDF is about 
machine discernible and comprehensible semantics, but none of that means 
that a client MUST possess any such capabilities. In my eyes, RDF 
comprehension resides in vocabularies, never in the behavior of a client 
that's using HTTP to interact with content. i.e., a majority of HTTP 
clients will not exploit all the semantic implications expressed in a 
vocabulary or ontology.

This (I think) is the point Sandro is trying to relay in regards to his 
concerns about the above. We have to understand that (fundamentally) the 
Web's strength lies in its tolerance of the good, bad, and the ugly 
during client and server interactions.

On the Web (or any network with heterogeneous clients and servers) you 
could inadvertently sign up for the Army, but that signup will never 
stand up in the real world :-)

I've always seen entity relation semantics comprehension as a feature 
that clients and servers use to distinguish themselves competitively, 
but never the basis for MUST requirements in specs.

-- 

Regards,

Kingsley Idehen	
Founder & CEO
OpenLink Software
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