Re: Section 4: LDPR/non-LDPR formal definitions

hello henry.

On 2013-03-26 7:56 , Henry Story wrote:
> On Safari, Chrome and Netscape it shows it as plain text. That is it does no interpretation
> whatsoever more than converting them to ascii strings and displaying them as such. This
> is indeed the correct behavior. You get as a user to see the "<html>..." characters as posted.

it's not converted to ASCII, it is simply displayed in the character set 
that is signaled in HTTP. the server says it's sending plain text, the 
client treats it as plain text. end of story.

> So as you see when you post HTML it can show you links even if they are broken. Changing the
> mime type just changes the interpretation of the bytes.

what do you mean by "show links"? you mean because you as a reader of 
plain text know HTML, you can parse it and then recognize the links? 
instead think of me showing this plain text to my mom. she might spot 
some words and read them out aloud, and would simply have no idea about 
the whole markup stuff and would say "and then there are a lot of weird 
characters in there". she'd never get to identifying links because she 
(unlike you) doesn't parse HTML in her head very well. so it doesn't 
matter whether the links *in the HTML* were broken or working, when you 
serve HTML as plain text you just have no idea where they are (or what 
links are in the first place).

same for hyperRDF: when you see RDF, you see many URIs. some of them are 
just identifiers, never meant to be dereferenced (which is perfectly 
fine in RDF). some may be dereferencable, but you don't know which, and 
you don't know the service semantics of doing so. some may require 
specific interactions, such as "when you find a 'self-destruct' link, 
follow it with a DELETE method, and the server will self-destruct." you 
have no idea what the link semantics are unless you know the service, 
and just following links blindly only because you saw a URI and maybe 
even found an annotation hinting that this URI should be dereferenced 
using DELETE (without knowing the pragmatics, as you correctly pointed 
out), may lead to surprising results (such as self-destructing servers).

cheers,

dret.

Received on Tuesday, 26 March 2013 16:25:46 UTC