opaque uris and self-describing resources

hello.

Noah Slater wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 15, 2008 at 09:42:51AM -0800, Erik Wilde wrote:
>> repeating myself: i am still waiting for a single example from the 
>> "everything is http" followers where that approach was applied sucessfully. 
>> sure, it *could* be done, but it *has not been* done (at least as far as i 
>> know), and i am wondering why that is the case.
> Sure, let's take TBL's FOAF file:
> We can also request an RDF graph:
> Almost every ontology uses these techniques to make sure that you can
> "follow your nose"[1] and GET descriptions about things, be they
> concrete things like the moon or abstract things like POSIX STDIN.

like i said, i am well aware of the fact that you could make everything 
on the web opaque and just use rdf for semantics. i just don't believe 
that's a good way to go. if you can express semantics in a simpler way, 
you should do it. that in my personal opinion is the major issue with 
the w3c's tag finding on "the rule of least power", which in principle 
is a very good idea, but gets it wrong when asserting that using rdf 
follows that principle.

http://dret.typepad.com/dretblog/2007/11/powerful-rdf.html

but i know, i am digressing. but like i said, both approaches 
technically work (semantics in formats, or opaque formats and a 
universal semantics language), and given the w3c's investment in rdf, it 
seems pretty obvious what to expect from this direction...

cheers,

dret.

Received on Wednesday, 16 January 2008 00:03:20 UTC