Re: TB16 Re: Comments on arch doc draft

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.

-- 
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Received on Wednesday, 3 July 2002 13:05:50 UTC