- From: Elliotte Rusty Harold <elharo@metalab.unc.edu>
- Date: Thu, 19 Aug 2004 07:15:14 -0400
- To: John Cowan <jcowan@reutershealth.com>
- Cc: uri@w3.org
At 11:50 PM -0400 8/18/04, John Cowan wrote: >Do you think that stone lions, like the ones outside the New York >Public Library, are lions? They certainly don't belong to the >species _Panthera leo_. Well, now I suppose we're going to start arguing about Platonic forms, but yes; I think the stone lions do participate to some extent in the nature of "lion-ness". Of course, this occurs in the fuzzy world of human language where context is critical for sorting these things out so it's a bit of a canard. In the domain of technical specifications we're operating in here, it's possible to be much more precise, unambiguous, and clear. Indeed it is critical to do so. The current draft fails to achieve this. It is unclear, ambiguous, and imprecise. It cannot be properly understood without being familiar with the discussions that went into it, and the intentions of its authors. I am in the interesting position of straddling the line between the precise technical world of spec writing and the more imprecise world of human language. I often find myself trying to decide (and explain to copy editors) exactly when one should say "URI", "URL", "URL reference", "URI reference", "absolute URL", "absolute URI", etc. and explain the distinction to readers. It is simply confusing to readers to say that "absolute URI" is a synonym for "URI" and that a "relative URI" is not in fact a "URI". It is very difficult to write about this in a precise fashion, and in fact when it comes to helping readers to get practical work done myself and at least one other major author/editor in the XML space have come to the conclusion it's best to ignore URIs completely and simply talk about absolute and relative URLs, maybe with a footnote on URIs noting that they're a theoretical construct unlikely to be encountered in the real world readers are operating inn. When it comes to actually teaching developers and content creators how to use URLs for web site development and other purposes, it's been my repeated experience that they learn faster and more effectively if I simply say, "There are two kinds of URLs, relative and absolute" and go from there. Maybe on a bad day I'll mention URIs. If I try and explain the whole notion of URI references vs URIs, the class nods off. It's simply not a practical or useful distinction. I thought 2396bis might make this clearer (it does make some things clearer) but it's becoming apparent it's not going to. We seem likely to remain stuck in a division between the rarified realm of the spec writers and the practical world of developers and content creators; and the terminology mismatch between the two worlds is likely to continue to cause confusion for anyone moving between the two domains. Oh well. I suppose it's not that big a deal. People will continue to write web pages and design new URI schemes and APIs based on existing practice while blithely ignoring the actual specifications, just as they have for the last ten years; and the world will continue to spin on its axis. In the large scheme of things, the minor inconsistencies and noninteroperabilities that will arise because the spec is too unclear for non-language-lawyers to correctly interpret will be at worst minor warts on the face of the Web. Still, it does seem like a missed opportunity to finally remove these warts once and for all. -- Elliotte Rusty Harold elharo@metalab.unc.edu Effective XML (Addison-Wesley, 2003) http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/effectivexml http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN%3D0321150406/ref%3Dnosim/cafeaulaitA
Received on Thursday, 19 August 2004 13:34:40 UTC