Re: "Hash URIs" and content negotiation

On Nov 8, 2006, at 11:05 AM, Xiaoshu Wang wrote:
> Why not the same?

I don't think that there should be any controversy that different  
language translations are different things. Different people worked  
on them, there are different typographical errors, each might be  
slightly wrong or non-idiomatic in a different way. I think that if  
you asked a prominent translator whether their work product was the  
"same" as the original they might be (quite reasonably) offended.

The choice is whether you want the naming of things to be driven by  
the nature of the things, or the nature of the user interface. I  
think it's safer to name them by the former.

> Let's assume "the machine" to be a special kind of human
> being but only speaks RDF. Since human won't (at least not willingly)
> understand RDF and machine-humans won't understand HTML (at least not
> consistently), how do you supply descriptions to both human-humans and
> machine-human? Wouldn't the solution come down to content- 
> negotiation in
> some form?

It will come down to content understanding and decision making in  
some form. I just don't think it should be in the network protocol.  
For HTML, for example, there is a mechanism to embed rdf. That there  
are alternate translations could be embedded in that rdf, and a  
browser, on a user's behest, could certainly, upon reading about  
these translations, automatically redirect to the translation in the  
user's preferred language.

-Alan

Received on Wednesday, 8 November 2006 16:37:01 UTC