- From: Benja Fallenstein <b.fallenstein@gmx.de>
- Date: Sat, 26 Jul 2003 22:14:27 +0200
- To: rdf-i <www-rdf-interest@w3.org>
Hi all, I've noticed a thing about resources and representations that strikes me as peculiar. Let's say someone puts up a Web page containing the following: ...seems like the <a href="http://www.w3.org/Consortium/">W3C</a> is composed of a million monkeys typing on typewriters, whose keepers occasionally publish those typescripts that look like a technical specification... What does this <a> construct mean? What effect should it have in a browser? From <http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/links.html>: This section introduces the link (or hyperlink, or Web link), the basic hypertext construct. A link is a connection from one Web resource to another. Although a simple concept, the link has been one of the primary forces driving the success of the Web. A link has two ends -- called anchors -- and a direction. The link starts at the "source" anchor and points to the "destination" anchor, which may be any Web resource (e.g., an image, a video clip, a sound bite, a program, an HTML document, an element within an HTML document, etc.). [...] The default behavior associated with a link is the retrieval of another Web resource. This behavior is commonly and implicitly obtained by selecting the link (e.g., by clicking, through keyboard input, etc.). [...] href = uri [CT] This attribute specifies the location of a Web resource, thus defining a link between the current element (the source anchor) and the destination anchor defined by this attribute. By "retrieval of [a] resource," I presume the spec means "retrieval of a representation of a resource." So the link points to a resource, and if I click on the link, my browser is expected to show me some representation of this resource (it doesn't specify which representation). Assume that http://www.w3.org/Consortium/ identifies an organization, the World Wide Web Consortium. Assume that I have assigned http://example.org/~benja/w3c to denote the same organization. Both I and the owners of w3.org have provided authoritative information from which it is clear that the two URIs identify the same resource. We can then clearly conclude that <http://example.org/~benja/w3c> = <http://www.w3.org/Consortium/> . Assume that it is true that <http://example.org/~benja/w3c> hasRepresentation "W3C -- the standards body for Web technologies." . Then it is also true that <http://www.w3c.org/Consortium/> hasRepresentation "W3C -- the standards body for Web technologies." . (which is not the content of the Web page behind that URI). Given that the link in the example above, according to the HTML spec, points to the *resource*, does this mean that it would be acceptable for a browser to serve me "W3C -- the standards body for Web technologies" as a representation of the link target? Clearly not. It seems to me that the current situation is, - a URI corresponds to a set of representations - a URI denotes a resource - two URIs denoting the same resource can correspond to different sets of representations - if I link to a URI through HTML, my intention is not only to specify the resource I link to, but also the set of representations that is shown to a user when they click on the link. [In a sense, not the resource has a retrievable set of representations, but the URI that denotes the resource.] Obviously there's something wrong with this picture, but I don't know how to fix it. - Benja
Received on Saturday, 26 July 2003 16:16:11 UTC