Re: URIs For XHTML Terms

> but this is just adding a layer of indirection for the sake
> of easy readable N3, which strikes me as not justifying
> the effort.

No, the point is that the URLs that point to the definitions of the
terms in the HTML 4.01 specification do just that: point to the
*definitions* and not the actual terms themselves as resources. To
confuse the two would be a horrendous error. cf. the URIs for the XSD
datatypes.

> For machine processing it is just as easy to use the full
> URIs anyway.

For machine processing, we need URIs that unambiguously identify the
terms used in XHTML instances, and at the moment we only have QName
pairs. Think of it in terms of the XML Schema recommendation: does it
say to use the definitions of the datatypes as the URIs? No, because
those are the definitions of the datatypes, not the datatypes
themselves. The datatypes themselves have their own URIs which are set
out in the specification, and are different from both the definitions,
and the concatenations of the XSD QNames thereof.

This isn't some kind of magical hack, it's a recommended W3C practise,
that was thought up after XHTML 1.0 was published as a specification,
and so wasn't allowed for. To fix it is a trivial, but the result is
very important.

--
Kindest Regards,
Sean B. Palmer
@prefix : <http://webns.net/roughterms/> .
:Sean :hasHomepage <http://purl.org/net/sbp/> .

Received on Friday, 15 June 2001 12:14:59 UTC