Re: [whatwg] Link rot is not dangerous

Tab Atkins Jr. schreef:
> Once you remove discovery as a strong requirement, then you remove the
> need for large urls, and that removes the need for CURIEs, or any
> other form of prefixing.  You still want to uniquify your identifiers
> to avoid accidental clashes, but that's not that hard, nor is it
> absolutely necessary.  The system can be robust and usable even with a
> bit of potential ambiguity if small authors design their private
> vocabs badly.  As a bonus, everything gets simpler.  Essentially it
> devolves into something relatively close to Ian's microdata proposal,
> perhaps with datatype added in (though I do question how necessary
> that is, given a half-intelligent parser can recognize things as
> numbers or dates).
>   

Ho, ho, you’re making a big leap there! By me explaining that 
dereferencible URIs are not needed to make RDF work on a core level, 
which makes RDF robust, do not jump to the conclusion that it is of no 
benefit! URIs are there for the benefit of linking, and help 
discoverability a lot (just like HTML hyperlinks do). Spidering the 
semantic web in a follow-your-nose style is effective. Incidentally, if 
an ontology disappears from its original address, this kind of spidering 
will likely lead you to a copy thereof stored elsewhere. For example on 
a different spider which has the triples cached.

You are now only considering the ontologies, that is, types and 
properties. You’re forgetting (or ignoring) that in RDF, objects are 
also named with URIs so that data at other locations can refer to it. 
You know, that ‘web of linked data’ people refer to, core principle of 
RDF. No ‘simple’ scheme based on what Ian proposed can provide a 
sufficient level of uniqueness for that. URIs are the best and most 
natural fit for use as web-scale identifiers.

And then there is of course also the thing that there is already an 
existing framework, which has already been here for a long time, has had 
a lot of clever people work on it and is gaining in popularity, and here 
we have ‘HTML5’ wanting to reinvent the wheel and making an entirely new 
framework ‘just for them’. You’d think that of all places, in a 
standards body people would be compelled to adopt existing standards :).

~Laurens

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~~ Ushiko-san! Kimi wa doushite, Ushiko-san nan da!! ~~
Laurens Holst, student, Utrecht University, the Netherlands
Website: www.grauw.nl. Backbase employee; www.backbase.com