- From: Dan Brickley <danbri@danbri.org>
- Date: Sun, 18 Apr 2010 16:05:35 +0200
- To: nathan@webr3.org
- Cc: Semantic Web <semantic-web@w3.org>, public-lod <public-lod@w3.org>
On Sun, Apr 18, 2010 at 3:42 PM, Nathan <nathan@webr3.org> wrote: > Wonder what would happen if we just called them "Links"? I think that would confuse people. And would put stress just on the point where SemWeb and HTML notions of link diverge. An HTML page can have two (hyper-)links, <a href="/contactus/">contact us</a> in the header, and <a href="/contactus/">contacts</a> in the footer. Each of those chunks of markup is what we informally call a link; the relative URI reference inside the href attribute in both cases is what makes it possible for the link to be useful. I'm saying that http://example.com/contactus/ should be called a 'universal resource linker' instead of 'uniform resource locator'. Using 'universal resource link' for that instead has a different grammatical role and could confuse since the page has two links (the bits that go blue in your browser usually), but they both point to the same URI/URL. > Seems to be pretty unambiguous, if I say "Link" to TimBL or my Mum they > both know what I mean, and it appears to produce the desired mental > picture when used. There are two usages at least with link; 'pass me the link' versus 'click on the link'; the latter emphasises the occurance as being the link. > Link, short for HyperLink - Link as in Linked Data. > > Keep the URI/URL/IRI for those who need to know the exact syntax of a Link. So when the RDF perspective comes in, so do subtly different notions of link. This is why I think framing 'link' as a countable thing will lead to confusion. RDF links are a bit like relationships; so <a href="http://bob.example.com/" rel="xfn:coworker xfn:buddy">Bob</a> is a link expressing two relationships, er, links. If you poke to hard at the magic word "link" it kinda crumbles a bit. But it remains incredible evocative and at the heart of both the Web and the SemWeb. Linker is non-commital enough that allows a family of related readings; where the markup describes a pre-existing link/relationship (eg. co-worker), and where markup itself is the link we're interested in. If you check back to Timbl's original diagram in http://www.w3.org/History/1989/proposal.html the different flavours of 'link' were in there from the start; 'wrote' and 'refers to' for example; the former links a person to a document; the later connects documents. So the linking story here is that identifiers for people and documents can share a notation, and become linkable. What exactly a link is, on the other hand, I think will always be a little bit slippery. cheers, Dan
Received on Sunday, 18 April 2010 14:06:09 UTC