RE: Documents, Cars, Hills, and Valleys

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Miles Sabin [mailto:msabin@interx.com] 
> Sent: Wednesday, April 10, 2002 5:24 PM
> To: www-rdf-interest@w3.org
> Subject: RE: Documents, Cars, Hills, and Valleys
> 
> 
> Manos Batsis wrote,
> > Very simply, almost both sides are right. An HTTP URI represents a
> > document or fragment (after all, that's what it points to), which in
> > turn represents whatever. This should satisfy both sides. I don't 
> > see the point of this argument.
> 
> I'm happy to agree with this in some cases, but not in all.
> 
> In some situations it makes sense to think of representation as 
> transitive (ie. if the URI represents a document which in turn 
> represents todays news, then the URI represents todays news), 
> in which 
> case the URI is still ambiguous without additional context.
> 
> In other situations there's no document for the URI to 
> represent. This 
> is often the case with namespace URIs, in which case they represent
> an abstract namespace or nothing at all. If they do represent an
> abstract namespace, then why would putting a retrievable document at
> the end of them defeat their original non-retrievable reference?

Seems that the XML Names spec gets all the blame for this week. IMHO,
non-retrievable namespace URIs should only be URNs.
BTW, I strongly believe that a namespace declaration should be used to
bind a Schema or other (meta)information to a document (instead of the
current mechanism). I never understood why W3C decided against this much
more solid design.

Regards,

Manos

Received on Wednesday, 10 April 2002 10:50:25 UTC