RE: About httpRange-14

Steve,

Your email appears to be a duplicate from your previous email?  Was that on
purpose?

-Mike 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: uri-request@w3.org [mailto:uri-request@w3.org] On 
> Behalf Of Steve Pepper
> Sent: Thursday, December 20, 2007 8:56 AM
> To: 'Mike Schinkel'; noah_mendelsohn@us.ibm.com; uri@w3.org
> Subject: RE: About httpRange-14
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> It's interesting to see this discussion surface yet again. It 
> would seem that the 303-solution has neither dispelled 
> anxieties nor quelled the debate.
> 
> I would like to point out (once again [1]) that the cause of 
> the problem is the sleight-of-hand that took place when the 
> concept of resource was quietly redefined to mean "anything 
> that has identity" (i.e. anything whatsoever). This served to 
> blur the essential ontological distinction on the Web between
> (network-retrievable) information resources and "resources in 
> general".
> 
> The HTTP URI is fundamentally an addressing mechanism, and it 
> is fine to use it as an identifier for the thing it 
> addresses. However, most of the things we want to address are 
> NOT network-retrievable and don't have an address. That 
> doesn't mean we can't use HTTP URIs to address arbitrary 
> subjects, but it does mean that the mechanism has to work 
> differently for direct and indirect identification.
> 
> That's why Topic Maps provides two URI-based mechanisms: 
> subject locators for direct addressing, and subject 
> identifiers for indirect addressing. RDF needs the same. The 
> 303-kludge (I'm sorry, but what else can I call it?) does not 
> work for humans, neither those that assign identifiers nor 
> those that need to interpret them; and it only works for 
> machines if you dereference every identifier before deciding 
> what to do with it, and that simply doesn't scale.
> 
> Steve
> 
> [1]
> Curing the Web's Identity Crisis:
> http://www.ontopia.net/topicmaps/materials/identitycrisis.html
> 
> Towards the Semantic Superhighway:
> http://www.ibiblio.org/hhalpin/irw2006/spepper.html
> 
>  
> --
> Conference Chair, Topic Maps 2008
> Oslo, April 2-4 2008
> www.topicmaps.com
>  
> 
> | -----Original Message-----
> | From: uri-request@w3.org [mailto:uri-request@w3.org] On 
> Behalf Of Mike 
> | Schinkel
> | Sent: 18 December 2007 21:58
> | To: noah_mendelsohn@us.ibm.com; uri@w3.org
> | Subject: About httpRange-14
> | 
> | 
> | Noah:
> | 
> | I just spent some time re-reading the long series of email 
> discussions 
> | about
> | httpRange-14 [1].
> | 
> | It seems they addressed at length what a URI points to, but did not 
> | address what does point to a thing when one wants to be 
> able to get an 
> | associate representation about that thing.
> | 
> | Further it seemed to me that most of the members in the discussion 
> | reasonably saw the need for the HTTP URL to identify a 
> thing and were 
> | okay with some ambiguity, but that TimBL was most adamant that it 
> | behave certain ways in order that it be consistent with his 
> vision for 
> | RDF. Would you concur or disagree?
> | 
> | BTW, my takeaway from the results of that discussion (thus far) is 
> | that things might have been much different had RDF not been 
> a central 
> | focus of TimBL at that time. That seems to me to be a shame 
> | considering how RDF is still only used on the periphery of 
> the web and 
> | certainly not as part of the mainstream web.  And IMO, RDF will 
> | probably never make the mainstream because it requires people to be 
> | too concise, and people in general are not good at being concise 
> | (witness the percentage of HTML files on the web that
> | validate...)
> | 
> | --
> | -Mike Schinkel
> | http://www.mikeschinkel.com/blogs/
> | http://www.welldesignedurls.org
> | http://atlanta-web.org
> | 
> | [1] http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/issues.html
> 
> 
> 
> 
>

Received on Friday, 21 December 2007 00:00:31 UTC