- From: Al Gilman <asgilman@iamdigex.net>
- Date: Thu, 27 Sep 2001 12:24:25 -0400
- To: Stephen Cranefield <SCranefield@infoscience.otago.ac.nz>, "'uri@w3.org'" <uri@w3.org>
Better quote. [quote] The semantics of a fragment identifier is a property of the data resulting from a retrieval action, regardless of the type of URI used in the reference. Therefore, the format and interpretation of fragment identifiers is dependent on the media type [RFC2046] of the retrieval result. [snip] [end quote] I would recommend that you read this as substantiating Roy's claim that the document asserts scheme independence for what it says about #fragment interpretation. And URN vs. URL independence. The upshot of looking at generic URN religion likewise should be that "URNs on the whole don't tell you about the means of retrieval" principle should also be interpreted as "URNs on the whole don't tell you about the feasibility of retrieval" as well. 'Resources' are by common usage expected to be of some use. The generic 'retrieval' notion is just whatever you have to do in order to be ready to use the Resource. This is not required to be universal, but it is just so endemic to the many ways of providing value added that it is assumed by default. A URN scheme that denies all possibility of retrieval is not impossible by the URI generic rules, it is just bad market positioning of technology, a "market loser in waiting." Don't look for a more computer-understandable prior notion than the above description that 'resource' is something of potential utility; and a URI as a string which assists authors in recording a reference to a resource and consumers of the recorded reference in isolating the indicated resource. The only thing that _all_ URIs share is some rules about how you put characters in the string. This discipline allows strings written in a distributed fashion to avoid accidental string-compare collisions. End of URI-universal story. The specification of the uniform syntax for the unified scheme of reference is borne out our hard-won small agreements on what we would all _do_ from people with very different _notions_ of what resource identifiers _should be_. How you interpret what it means depends on the characters in the string, and quite legitimately may depend on the context in which you are interpreting them. At least you won't interpret a reference as referring to the wrong resource. Al
Received on Thursday, 27 September 2001 12:19:40 UTC