'#' exit document space? (was: Documents, Cars, Hills, and Valleys)

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