Re: fragment identifiers

On Wednesday, July 24, 2002, at 09:58  AM, Sean B. Palmer wrote:

>> How does EARL break? If EARL is broken, I suspect
>> _something else_ broke it. Educate us.
>
> The problem is explained to some extent in:-
>
> http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-rdf-interest/2002Apr/0134

That problem is simple to fix.  It is natural to want to make statements
about resources and about representations of resources.  It is necessary
to distinguish between the two when targeting an assertion, since most
assertions about resources are going to be statements about the range
of representations over time.  In other words, the reason that REST
distinguishes the two is precisely because we wanted to solve that problem
back in 1995.  It is solved for HTTP/1.1.  Now we just need to find the
corresponding syntax for it in RDF.

You mention: "We could remove the indirection if we could know for
certain that HTTP URIs identify "documents", since we could be fairly
sure that the URI above represents some online documentation about the
tool, and not the tool itself."  This reasoning assumes that people
would not want to make statements about documents that describe other
documents (not just other objects outside of Web-space), and therefore
is less reliable than simply making the distinction explicit.  In any
case, the precondition is false, so let's move on to a solution that
will actually work in practice.

....Roy

Received on Thursday, 25 July 2002 17:27:41 UTC