Re: URIs vs. URIviews (was: Agenda for RDFCore WG Telecon 2002-02-15)

At 03:08 PM 2/14/02 -0600, Dan Connolly wrote:
>On Thu, 2002-02-14 at 13:20, Aaron Swartz wrote:
> >  o The WG resolves that the use of absolute URIs with fragment IDs is a
> >    to identify Web resources is relatively incompatible with current Web
> >    architecture.
>
>?????
>
>Er.. it's the very heart of web architecture:
>
>   The principle that anything, absolutely anything, "on the Web"
>   should identified distinctly by an otherwise opaque string
>   of characters (A URI and possibly a fragment identifier) is
>   core to the universality.
>
>         -- http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Architecture

I just noticed that this document, and 
http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Fragment.html, have recently been updated to 
try and address this RDF vs Web resource issue.

But I still think there are some inconsistencies here:  a URI (without 
fragment) refers to a concept that may be represented variously by data 
with different MIME types, but the interpretation of the fragment 
identifier itself varies with the MIME type of the data to which it is applied.

The penultimate section of http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Fragment.html 
acknowledges the problem, and even mentions possible changes to HTTP to fix 
this (which look to me in some respects like a fairly fundamental change in 
web architecture).

Then the final section notes:

[[[
User awareness of the form of a reference

Clearly when a fragment ID is generated and associated with a URI which is
generic in any way (language, version, etc as well as content-type), then
there is a possible failure of the fragment-id refers to something which is
not defined in any specific instance.  It would be appropriate for a client,
when generating a link (or bookmark, etc) to provide the user with a choice
of

A bookmark to the whole living document, or
A bookmark to a specific part of a "dead" version;
Intermediate combinations.

As both these options are meaningful and useful, they will have to surface
at the user interface level.
]]]

This last bit seems to me to be somewhat counter to RDF's goal of providing 
ground for a web of machine-processable information.

#g



------------------------------------------------------------
Graham Klyne                    MIMEsweeper Group
Strategic Research              <http://www.mimesweeper.com>
<Graham.Klyne@MIMEsweeper.com>

Received on Thursday, 14 February 2002 17:30:41 UTC