- From: Graham Klyne <GK@ninebynine.org>
- Date: Thu, 11 Apr 2002 09:04:10 +0100
- To: "Tim Berners-Lee" <timbl@w3.org>
- Cc: <www-rdf-interest@w3.org>
At 06:22 PM 4/10/02 -0400, Tim Berners-Lee wrote: >The semantic web must model HTTP faithfully. > >The solution of course is very simple, because the # allows us >to jump from documents to things through the mime type. >We just invent a new language, not a new protocol. This cost is >much smaller. > >Because even a semantic web which talks about Mark and his cars >is still doing it with documents, and the document way of working >is still useful, and the hTTP machinery for talking about the >properties of the documents themselves is important. > >Given that the # allows us to be free of any restriction, we avoid forcing >HTTP to be what it ain't and still get all we need. This seems to be putting an awful burden of responsibility on one character, something I had seen as a small syntactic device... It seems, reading your comments, that one SHOULD NOT use a bare HTTP URL to identify, say, an XML namespace because that is not a document. I suppose it has a certain elegance, because the document: http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns can be viewed as describing the namespace: http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns# which seems to be how things work out in practice (for RDF, at least). But I'm concerned that this represents a changing from widely understood principles, and will be difficult to deploy consistently (in people's minds and in software). #g ------------------- Graham Klyne <GK@NineByNine.org>
Received on Thursday, 11 April 2002 05:04:06 UTC