Re: .htaccess a major bottleneck to Semantic Web adoption / Was: Re: RDFa vs RDF/XML and content negotiation

On 8 Jul 2009, at 19:58, Seth Russell wrote:

> Is it not true that everything past the hash (#alice) is not  
> transmitted back to the server when a browser clicks on a  
> hyperlink ?   If that is true, then the server would not be able to  
> serve anything different if a browser clicked upon http:// 
> example.com/foaf.rdf or if they clicked upon http://example.com/ 
> foaf.rdf#alice .

Indeed - the server doesn't see the fragment.

> If that is true, and it probably isn't, then is not the Semantic  
> Web crippled from using that techniqe to distinguish between  
> resources and at the same time hyper linking between those  
> different resources?


Not at all.

Is the web of documents crippled because the server can't distinguish  
between requests for http://example.com/document.html and http:// 
example.com/document.html#part2 ? Of course it isn't - the server  
doesn't need to distinguish between them - it serves up the same web  
page either way and lets the user agent distinguish.

Hash URIs are very valuable in linked data, precisely *because* they  
can't be directly requested from a server - they allow us to bypass  
the whole HTTP 303 issue.

-- 
Toby A Inkster
<mailto:mail@tobyinkster.co.uk>
<http://tobyinkster.co.uk>

Received on Wednesday, 8 July 2009 23:37:37 UTC