- From: Paul Prescod <paul@prescod.net>
- Date: Wed, 03 Jul 2002 10:05:16 -0700
- To: Joshua Allen <joshuaa@microsoft.com>
- CC: Jonathan Borden <jonathan@openhealth.org>, Patrick Stickler <patrick.stickler@nokia.com>, ext Tim Bray <tbray@textuality.com>, WWW TAG <www-tag@w3.org>
Joshua Allen wrote: > >... > > There are certain people (I assume yourself included?) who feel that > URIs identify *nothing*, unless they are accompanied with ontology > information; and say that therefore it is smart to use http: URLs to > identify cars and butterflies, since "lots of people know how to > dereference http: URLs". Let me rephrase that. URIs always identify something. And that something can always be *represented* by some documentation, or schema or picture or SOMETHING. It isn't that a URI without a dereference is useless. It's that it is like software without documentation: inconvenient and amateurish. >... > Most people (including me) think that http: scheme URIs should be used > for WEB PAGES. Even Paul Prescod would agree that http: scheme URIs > should be used exclusively for resources which are interacted with > through the standard HTTP verbs. Right. And that should be all resources (with the arguable exception of resources that ALREADY live in a real-world or legacy namespace like ISBNs or MIME media types). But that is a separable debate. > Let's just acknowledge that there are (at least) two opposing viewpoints > WRT the *wisdom* of overloading http: URIs, and resolving the > fundamental disagreement isn't a necessary step toward getting the > *namespaces* issue settled. Your use of the word "overloading" "begs the question". Using HTTP to serve up documentation for a namespace is not overloading anything. It is using a helpful property of the web information system to get from an identifier for an abstraction to the documentation for the abstraction. -- Come discuss XML and REST web services at: Open Source Conference: July 22-26, 2002, conferences.oreillynet.com Extreme Markup: Aug 4-9, 2002, www.extrememarkup.com/extreme/
Received on Wednesday, 3 July 2002 13:05:50 UTC