Re: Using "Punning" to Answer httpRange-14

On Mon, May 14, 2012 at 12:53 PM, Kingsley Idehen
<kidehen@openlinksw.com> wrote:
> On 5/14/12 6:20 AM, Michiel de Jong wrote:
> > no. if a vocabulary has not already thought about which one of the 4
> > options a certain property means, then it was broken.
>
>
> The Web is Broken. The Web is Alive. That's why it works. You can "sense" or
> "perceive" via different "context lenses".
[...]
> Yes, via your "context lenses" it closes the HttpRange-14 discussion, what
> about the "context lenses" of others? Look, The Web has many aspects to it,
> and the key is to make these aspects manifest unobtrusively.
>
> The Web doesn't work because a specific vocabulary has been *knowingly*
> adopted. It works because the architecture is dexterous and accommodating to
> different world views.

okay, so let's see what happens if punning people, 303 people, and
hash uri rule people all write both information providers and
information consumers.

abbreviating 'subject-content, object-sense' as 'cs', and likewise for
cs, sc, and ss.

for the punning people, each vocabulary would choose 1 of 4 types (cc,
cs, sc, ss) for each link relation. They will build both their servers
and clients with this assumption.

For the 303 people, their information servers will always give a 303
first if you follow a URL that's used in a cs or ss link. And for the
hash uri rule people, the URIs they put into cs or ss links will
always have a # in them. Neither of these practices break the other
two systems, so that's cool, we're all still compatible then.

Now the 303 and hash uri rule people build clients. their clients will
expect to find a 303s, resp. URLs with hashes, for all cs and ss URIs.
both will know that if they encounter information servers from the
other 'world views', this will not be true. so they might throw a
warning saying 'warning: document is not hash-uri-rule compliant', or
'warning: expected 303, got document'. but their clients would
probably just deal with these warnings.

so i agree totally with you that consumers of data should be aware
that different providers of data use different systems, and that's how
the web can be 'broken and alive' as you say.

but so far we assumed that the vocabulary specs were written by
punning people. what happens when a 303 person writes a vocabulary?
They'll say for instance:

Where indicated, this vocabulary relies on 303s to determine whether a
'c-' relation is cs or cc.

And then for 'subject' they would say "Note: unless the URI given
yields a 303, the default assumption of this vocabulary is that the
current document is secondary literature about another document."

Likewise for hash-uri-rule people.


It gets a bit awkward if vocabulary authors don't state which world
view they belong to. then we probably end up asking on stackoverflow
"does the potplants vocab assume 303s?" and then people would look at
who wrote it, and maybe ask the author and post the answer. i mean,
there would probably be a way to find out when a vocab author intends
implementors to rely on 303s for disambiguation of the vocab spec.

so yes, i am aware that there are, and will be people who do not
accept punning as the solution, and will instead continue to rely on
303s and the hash-uri-rule in their information servers, information
consumers, and vocabulary specs.

so i'm not saying we should stop these people from doing that. we
should make our clients interoperate with them, surely. and they
should make their clients interoperate with our specs and information
servers. that way everybody can be happy and the web can be 'alive'.

Received on Monday, 14 May 2012 12:16:27 UTC