- From: Joshua Allen <joshuaa@microsoft.com>
- Date: Mon, 29 Jul 2002 21:08:14 -0700
- To: "Tim Bray" <tbray@textuality.com>, "Tim Berners-Lee" <timbl@w3.org>
- Cc: <www-tag@w3.org>
> >>> "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." > > >> 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 > > > 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. > > Indeed, I mis-parsed Joshua's point, but I come back with the same > question: How do you get this kind of confidence? Joshua suggests that > the answer has to do with how you go about naming resources. I don't > get it; further explanation please? It is tautological. URIs exist to unambiguously identify things. The proposed text offers no advice about *how* to guarantee the unambiguous identification characteristics of a URI. It simply affirms that this is the *purpose* of URIs, and recommends that people choose URIs which do not conflict with that purpose.
Received on Tuesday, 30 July 2002 00:09:01 UTC