Re: URIs versus URI references [was: My top two issues]

On Mon, 2001-12-17 at 16:22, Mark Baker wrote:

>> Issue; URIs versus URI references
>> 
>> This issue flares up every so often.

I'm inclined to think there's a closely-related family of
issues here that might reward exploration.  Recently, the 
usage of URI machinery has spread across the landscape: 
XML namespaces, RDF's slight variation on that, XLink 
role/arcrole (see RDDL at http://www.rddl.org), and so on.  

Some of the decisions that arise when you're doing this are:

- relative or absolute?
- fragments OK or not? 
- URNs sometimes always or never?
- the trick that RDF does of conventionally using a trailing #
  and relying on concatenation for finer-grain identification
  (not quite the same issue as fragments?)

There have been some awfully extended debates around these 
things, and I think some dubious results - I've never been
happy about the RDF trick.  In any case, since the URI
seems increasingly to be at the centre of everything, some
decision procedures on how to use them properly would be 
useful.

How important is this task in the spectrum of things to which
the TAG could turn its attention?  And a related issue - is
this maybe the IETF's problem, not ours?  I don't know. -Tim

Received on Wednesday, 19 December 2001 12:45:07 UTC