Re: does RDF require understanding all 82 URI schemes?

Bill de hOra <bill@dehora.fsnet.co.uk> wrote:

> What extra do you get from
> data URIs, other than a mimetype (which seems questionable)?

The biggest benefit (in my eyes) is that we clean up the RDF model and
simplify understand, usage and implementation.

Things can likely be kept completely backward-compatible, making this seem a
very good choice.

> Though mind you that does raise a point. Since data URIs don't refer to
> resources, do the set of resources need to explicitly exclude the data URI as
> being possible identifiers? Has this come up before?

Data URIs don't refer to resources -- they simply are the resources that one
would normally expect a URI to refer to. Therefore, I don't think data: URIs
need to be explicitly excluded since they do happen to be resources, just
different than what we'd normally expect.

The biggest difference is that you cannot declare a data: URI to represent
anything else, as you can with an HTTP URI. Data URIs are sort of these odd
sort of immutable things... they're neat. ;-)

-- 
[ Aaron Swartz | me@aaronsw.com | http://www.aaronsw.com ]

Received on Wednesday, 14 February 2001 21:00:31 UTC