- From: Larry Masinter <LMM@acm.org>
- Date: Sun, 4 May 2003 09:03:21 -0700
- To: <uri@w3.org>
> Any revisions to RFC 2396, however, *must* account for and support > these special needs of the SW. I disagree. I think the claims made about the needs of the "semantic web" are based on a false presumption that URIs can be used to "denote" in ways that they cannot. URIs do not "denote". The question "What does URI http://blahlah.example.org/blahblah denote?" is, in general, unanswerable. The act of "denoting" is something that a speaker of a statement might do, using a URI, but the denotation is not a property of the URI but of the speaker's use of it. URIs do (attempt to) "Identify". They do this by making reference to some algorithm associated with the scheme. "http" URIs identify something that you use the HTTP protocol to talk to. A speaker may use a URI in a context (e.g., an xmlns= in some XML body) to denote something; if the context is well-defined, the denotation of the URI might be well-defined. I think it's important that RFC 2396bis explicitly disclaim any responsibility for denotation, since it is so widely presumed. Larry -- http://larry.masinter.net
Received on Sunday, 4 May 2003 12:03:45 UTC