Re: Namespaces wihtout "#" Was: Few CWM Bugs

This ain't necessarily so. It seems perfectly reasonable to me to associate a
fragment of SVG that happens to be a picture of me with the concept of me,
rather than assume that I would do this in an XHTML document.

I think it also makes sense for me to refer to a fragment of RDF inside an
RDF document, that says (for a random example) "chaals is australian". I
could make two statements about that bit of RDF - one, that the idea being
expressed is asserted by Tim, and another, that the particular assertion
encoded there has the author Tim. It is not clear to me that there is an a
priori way to disambiguate the usages.

Since I still have a bit of an "aagh" reaction to Sean's desire to add more
context to every context, in practice (although in principle I think it is
eactly what we are trying to enable), this is so far just making my head
hurt. <sigh/>

chaals

On Mon, 26 Nov 2001, Tim Berners-Lee wrote:

  > I have a couple of problems with this:
  > (a) this is rather at odds with the earlier definition of identifying
  > something "within a web document".

  Well, isn't it the same concept of "whatever a local identifier stands for
  in the
  language of the document"?  The early web langauges used identifiers to
  identify bits of human-readable stuff.

  > (b) It's not clear to me that RDF is unequivocally associated with a MIME
  > type.   What's the MIME type of RDF embedded in an XHTML document?

  For most questions of semantics, the XML mime types defer to the
  specification of the namespace.   However,  there is not a very clean
  hand-off from the XML spec to a namespace spec in the case of the
  fragment identifier.  For example, most generic XML applications
  will happily use an XML ID to refer to a chunk of XML (whatever
  it means, if it means anything).  Implicitly SVG uses it to refer to a
  circle,
  for example, but that is really because there is no ambiguity
  in that nothing needs the option of referring both to the XML chunk
  and to the circle.  RDF could I suppose do the same, say that
  any reference in the semnatic web langauges to foo.edf#bar
  refers to the concept bar, not to a chunck of syntax.

Received on Tuesday, 27 November 2001 00:52:57 UTC