Re: WebID 1.0 -- Section 3 -- Removal of Note

On 18 February 2013 12:19, Melvin Carvalho <melvincarvalho@gmail.com> wrote:

> Out of curiosity, do you feel that you understand what the hash symbol is
> for now?  IE that it is an identifier WITHIN a document, rather than, the
> document itself.  Thus a document can have a licence like creative commons,
> and an entity inside can have a name and an avatar etc.
>
> If so, what has guided you to that level of understanding.
>
> I've never had difficulty explaining this to non or semi technical
> people.  But for programmers it can be quite a challenge.  How do you think
> we can make it easier?
>

Hi Melvin,

Yes, I always understood that a fragment ID is a reference within a
document (e.g., anchors in an HTML document), but I didn't latch onto the
idea of having distinct URIs for the thing and the document describing it.
IIRC, in the original documents, hash URIs were used in examples but
without explaining why they were preferred over a non-hash (non-303) URI,
i.e., just a plain web resource. I figured, if the profile is the only
thing in the document, as was the case for most or all of the examples
(going by memory), what's the difference?

It was only when this debate erupted a few months ago, leading me to read
some of the materials referenced in the posts, that I started to understand
their purpose. To tell the truth, there are still some points that I'm a
little unclear on, but this probably isn't the forum to delve into them.

So, to answer your question, I think it would help to have a few sentences
about the distinction between URIs for real-world objects and for
information resources, to introduce the topic to those unfamiliar, along
with links to a couple of good, straightforward primers on the subject
(such as the "Cool URIs for the Semantic Web" doc that's been mentioned).
Avoid dropping newbies into long, confusing discussions that make little
sense to those not already deeply involved in the subject.