Stop Cross-Posting Please! (was Re: genid example from RDF1.1 is bad)

Please stop cross-posting!

Henry, the W3C Mailing list policy says

    Each mailing list has a specific purpose; please try to avoid widely
    cross-posting to multiple lists if possible.

Your (and David Booth's) initial cross-posting of your comments about 
ld-patch were unnecessarily cross-posted, but I could at least see how 
it was in-scope for the lists you each chose.   But this email has no 
business on public-ldp-comments or public-ldp. It's also problematic to 
cross post to an official comments list like public-rdf-comments, since 
it lures people from other lists into making what might be official 
comments, forcing the relevant Working Group to do more work to handle them.

Finally, I need to comment on your tone.  Many of us get passionate 
about technical issues we care about, and it's possible I've used words 
like "repulsive" as you did about a design I didn't like, but if I did, 
I soon regretted it.   If a design seems that bad, particularly one in a 
W3C recommendation, it's probably because one is misunderstanding it.  
And if the designers did make a colossal mistake, calling it "repulsive" 
isn't going to get it fixed any faster.

Thanks everyone for helping making the Web and W3C relatively nice 
places to be.

       -- Sandro


On 09/23/2014 02:59 AM, henry.story@bblfish.net wrote:
> I just noticed the section on using ".well-known" URIs for 
> skolemisation in the RDF1.1 spec.
> This lead to the following exactract of a conversation on the Linked 
> Data Protocol mailing list.
> I am 100% against that and believe it should be removed for the next 
> version of the RDF spec.
> I also propose a path to an improvement for it.
>
> On 23 Sep 2014, at 00:40, Pierre-Antoine Champin 
> <pierre-antoine.champin@liris.cnrs.fr 
> <mailto:pierre-antoine.champin@liris.cnrs.fr>> wrote:
>
>> Hi Henry,
>>
>> On Mon, Sep 22, 2014 at 4:06 PM, henry.story@bblfish.net 
>> <mailto:henry.story@bblfish.net> <henry.story@bblfish.net 
>> <mailto:henry.story@bblfish.net>> wrote:
>>
>>
>>     I find genids pretty hackish part of the rdf1.1 spec frankly.
>>     Genids are recognised apparently by analysing the schema
>>     of the URI, which is pretty much against web architecture.
>>     http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf11-concepts/#section-skolemization
>>
>>     So now every RDF linked data client would need to look at each
>>     URI to see if it contains a ".wellknown/genid" string to know if
>>     it should follow it
>>     or not. That's pretty un linked-data-ish. Frankly I am quite
>>     surprised it made its way through to the spec. The people
>>     supporting it
>>     must have made a lot of noise.
>>
>>
>> Not everything is about your particular use case, Henry ;-)
>
> The arguments I am relying upon, which I will make explicit to you 
> below, go way beyond my particular use case,
> and don't just take into account one spec, but the whole ecosystem of 
> the web.
>
>>
>> RDF does not equate linked data. It does not mandate URIs to be 
>> derefenceable. In that regard, genid URIs are no special case, so 
>> they do not need the special treatment that you suggest above. If you 
>> try to dereference them, you will get a 404, that's all. It's not 
>> ideal in a Linked Data perspective (though not lethal either), but it 
>> is perfectly acceptable from the point of view of RDF.
>
> RDF 1.1 is part of a series of specification, where each specification 
> does its job. is specified at the logical layer, so all it requires
> is the concept an IRI. That is the concept of a name with a referent. 
> It's not  part of the mandate of RDF to specify how IRIs are meant to 
> work.
>
> But the IRI specs on the other had do have something to say on the 
> issues, and so does the overriding habit of use on the web. That is
> that an http, https, ftp, ftps uris refer without #uris refer to 
> resources on the web which can be accessed by making an HTTP GET on that
> resource. Minting http URIs with the aim that they would return a 404 
> is just extreemly bad practice. A bit like a web site that had links that
> lead nowhere. Your web site would very soon be placed on the list of 
> abandoned web sites, your ranking would fall dramatically in
> search engines, your user experience would be lousy, etc... ( And note 
> that the RDF1.1 spec says nothing about this type of user experience
> either, but that does not mean it does not exist ).
>
> So I don't of course have anything against skolemisation, which makes 
> perfect sense, but the example of a skolemisation URI
> used in RDF1.1 is absolutely repulsive, and SHOULD be removed as soon 
> as possible.
>
> Instead they should choose a URN that does this or create a bnode URN 
> type such as
>   bnode:{domain}:{path}:{etag}:{identifier}
>
> where it is explicit that  this URN cannot be dereferenced
>
> Henry Story
> http://bblfish.net/
>
>
>
>