- From: Miles Sabin <miles@milessabin.com>
- Date: Mon, 5 Aug 2002 15:26:35 +0100
- To: www-tag@w3.org
Tim Berners-Lee wrote, > The idea that is "inevitable" that people will use the same URI to > identify different things is true only in that is "inevitable" that > people will plus 110V appliances into 220V circuits. That is, they > can't do it without breaking the protocols. Perhaps, but then perhaps it's inadvisable to promote a convention which will inevitably be violated. If anything, that would penalize those who actually do what they're supposed to. > The Semantic Web is, *unlike english*, built upon this well-defined > foundation. Any suggestion that it is "OK" to just use the same URI > to denote two different things, or to suggest one has the right in a > hostile way to claim to define a URI in someone else's space, is to > break the rules. One of the reasons we're arguing here now is that the semantic web and it's rules don't exist yet (at least, not in any particularly significant sense), so current practice can't break them. Proposing rules which will collide head on with widespread existing practices strikes me a reckless. > "Er... and how do you disallow identifiers from identifying whatever > people think they identify?", you ask. > > By specifications, darn it! Where the consumers of those specifications are relatively few in number and have comparatively aligned interests this can be made to work (viz. the W3C). But the semantic web has considerably grander ambitions and the consumers of its specs are (hopefully) considerably more numerous and diverse in their interests. Attempting to coral those consumers is likely to be about as successful as the Academic Francaise's attempts to banish imported anglicisms from French. It would be a shame if the W3C ended up looking similarly pompous and preposterous. Cheers, Miles
Received on Monday, 5 August 2002 10:27:07 UTC