- From: <noah_mendelsohn@us.ibm.com>
- Date: Tue, 2 Jul 2002 17:21:19 -0400
- To: "Jonathan Borden" <jonathan@openhealth.org>
- Cc: "Graham Klyne" <GK@NineByNine.org>, "Paul Grosso" <pgrosso@arbortext.com>, www-tag@w3.org
I doubt I'm the first person to observe this, but I wonder whether there is a deeper issue lurking beneath this RDF discussion: on the web, resources have first class status in the architecture, but representations do not. This seems almost a self-contradiction in the web architecture. Web architecture strongly suggests that everything of importance should be a resource identified by a URI, but representations are clearly of importance, but are not resources and are not named with URIs. As we've seen, the use of fragment identifiers to provide addressing within these non-resources results (not surprisingly) in fragility. I think it's fair to say that some of the comments made by Jeff Mogul in his WWW 2002 paper are similar in spirit to the concern I raise here. If this is indeed the underlying problem, then I wonder whether the Tag might not do well to first clarify the role of representations on the Web, and with that as a basis discuss the addressing of portions of a representation using fragment identifiers. Having achieved that, one would expect to be able to explain the behavior of RDF in particular. I should admit that I have no particularly good ideas as to what exactly the Tag should propose regarding representations, merely a sense that some clarification is in order. (Honestly, it would make sense to me if representations were themselves resources, but obviously the Web does not work that way today, and incompatible changes would clearly be impractical.) Also: I will be on vacation for a couple of weeks starting Thurs. Sorry to lob this into the fray and disappear, but I am unlikely to participate in further discussion here past tomorrow. Hope this is of some help as a parting shot. [1] http://www2002.org/CDROM/refereed/444/index.html ------------------------------------------------------------------ Noah Mendelsohn Voice: 1-617-693-4036 IBM Corporation Fax: 1-617-693-8676 One Rogers Street Cambridge, MA 02142 ------------------------------------------------------------------
Received on Tuesday, 2 July 2002 17:35:01 UTC