- From: Tim Berners-Lee <timbl@w3.org>
- Date: Mon, 29 Jul 2002 19:42:28 -0400
- To: Tim Bray <tbray@textuality.com>
- Cc: www-tag@w3.org
On Monday, July 29, 2002, at 06:17 PM, Tim Bray wrote: > > Joshua Allen wrote: > >> "If two people independently use the same URI as an identifier, they >> should be able to have a reasonable degree of confidence that they are >> identifying the same resource. People should not be required to >> parse, dereference, or otherwise >> acquire any *additional* disambiguating information to provide this >> basic guarantee. Resource naming practices should be considered >> carefully, and people are >> strongly discouraged from naming resources in a manner that >> unnecessarily weakens this guarantee." > Nicely put. > The intent seems good, but how on earth do you build this confidence? > By relying on the human-language semantics of the opaque part of the > URI? Absolutely not. Joshua didn't mean that you knew what each URI meant by just looking at it -- he meant (I think/hope!) that you know from the architecture that the two occurrences of the URI will identify the same thing, whatever that is. There is no ambiguity built into the architecture itself. This is a core principle fo the Web which we seem to be in danger of forgetting. Tim BL
Received on Monday, 29 July 2002 19:42:17 UTC