RE: [httpRange-14] What do HTTP URIs Identify?

Ah... but where the assets are critical, it is a good 
idea to give teeth to this, to lash the competitors for 
the URI together with knives.

Because of competing organizations for specifications, 
a code specification alone won't do the job, TimBL.  

It simply won't.

The world is full of people and organizations which 
flout that and always will.  For those that see 
specifications for critical systems to be of such 
value that flouting them is dangerous for the polity 
at large, the specification must have the force of 
law and it must have teeth.  The W3C is a vendor 
consortium by your own choice and design.  That makes 
it the wrong polity to dispense law.

Isolate out the pieces which are mission critical 
and must have the force of law, then submit these 
specifications to ISO for standardization where the 
mebers are nation-states with the authority granted 
by the people to dispense law "of the people, by 
the people, for the people".  This is not poetry, 
philosophical irrelevance, or rhetoric:  it is the 
principle which governs and maintains governance 
best, by example, and by historical proof.

You cannot solve it in code, Tim.  It does have a 
social component, so society must choose.

len

-----Original Message-----
From: Miles Sabin [mailto:miles@milessabin.com]

Tim Berners-Lee wrote,

> "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.

Received on Monday, 5 August 2002 13:54:04 UTC