- From: Dan Connolly <connolly@w3.org>
- Date: Thu, 05 May 2005 22:32:21 -0500
- To: kendall@monkeyfist.com
- Cc: RDF Data Access Working Group <public-rdf-dawg@w3.org>
On Thu, 2005-05-05 at 19:02 -0400, Kendall Clark wrote:
> On Thu, May 05, 2005 at 05:27:16PM -0500, Dan Connolly wrote:
>
> > But after looking at that design and the
> > "here's mine in a screenful..."
> > http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-rdf-dawg/2005AprJun/0054.html
> >
> > I prefer &data=... to &default-graph-uri=...
>
> You mean you prefer the parameter name "data" to the parameter name
> "default-graph-uri"?
yes.
> (Hence my skepticism when anyone says "the names don't matter"...!)
Yes, they're clearly arbitrary, and yet agreement is
critical to interoperability, and syntax engineering is
a big part of what makes the web go around, apparently.
Technically, one character names would suffice and would
save bytes on the wire. But short words seem reasonable.
multiple-word-names seem like overkill.
There were some "what if we had stuck to just one
or two characters for HTTP header field names?" studies
that left a lasting impression on me. Hunting thru
the archives, I find this in a draft from Mogul & Leach
in July 1997...
[[[
5.2 Abbreviations for Meter directives
To allow for the most efficient possible encoding of Meter headers,
we define abbreviated forms of all Meter directives. These are
exactly semantically equivalent to their non-abbreviated
counterparts. All systems implementing the Meter header MUST
implement both the abbreviated and non-abbreviated forms.
Implementations SHOULD use the abbreviated forms in normal use.
...
abb-meter-request-directive =
"w" ; "will-report-and-limit"
| "x" ; "wont-report"
| "y" ; "wont-limit"
]]
http://www.arctic.org/~dean/apache/standards/draft-ietf-http-hit-metering-03.txt
That seems like more complexity than I'm interested in.
--
Dan Connolly, W3C http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/
D3C2 887B 0F92 6005 C541 0875 0F91 96DE 6E52 C29E
Received on Friday, 6 May 2005 03:32:33 UTC