RE: pound sign vs. slash as final URI delimiter

Hi Bob,

My current rule of thumb is to use '/' unless there is some good
reason not to. But this is not a strongly held belief.

Why do I prefer '/' over '#'?
1) Fragment IDs imply downloading the source document, then picking through
   it for the bit you need. For large vocabularies, like many produced by
   Government agencies, this would be a performance issue.  (Of course,
   whether something is actually downloaded just because we have used its
   URL as a namespace ID is another issue.)
2) There are some people who are vociferous in maintaining that there is a
   very big difference between a resource and a fragment ID, and that RDF is
   about describing resources. I am not personally sure of this, but don't
see
   much harm in using '/'.

Why I hesitate to categorically state that '/' should be used instead of
'#'?
1) Because # should fit a lot better with picking a predicate out of an
   XML document that specifies the namespace.

I'd appreciate it if people could clarify things.

Ron

> -----Original Message-----
> From: www-rdf-interest-request@w3.org 
> [mailto:www-rdf-interest-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of 
> DuCharme, Bob (LNG-CHO)
> Sent: Monday, February 16, 2004 7:15 AM
> To: www-rdf-interest@w3.org
> Subject: pound sign vs. slash as final URI delimiter
> 
> 
> This feels like a beginner question, but after a few searches 
> I can't find
> any discussion of the issue. Let's say I have a namespace 
> identified by the
> URI http://www.example.com/pathname. To identify the name foo 
> from that
> namespace, what are the pros and cons of identifying it with a URI of
> http://www.example.com/pathname/foo as opposed to
> http://www.example.com/pathname#foo? The pound sign seems to 
> more clearly
> indicate "the following is a name from the namespace named up to this
> point," but I see that most references to Dublin Core names (e.g.
> http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/creator) use the slash. 
> 
> Perhaps the question is better framed without reference to 
> syntax: is it
> better for a name from a namespace to have it's own complete 
> URI or for it
> to be referenced using a fragment identifier appended to the 
> URI for its
> namespace?
> 
> thanks,
> 
> Bob
> 
>

Received on Monday, 16 February 2004 11:07:59 UTC