Re: Are we elements or animals? (was: Use of fragment identifiers in XML)

Aaron Swartz wrote:

> On Thursday, October 31, 2002, at 10:19 PM, pat hayes wrote:
...
> > If the latter, what language do you take it to be in (and whose
> > semantic rules you will use to help determine what it refers to)?
> > Myself, I would use RDF, seeing as it occurs in an RDF document. In
> > which case, the URI spec is irrelevant, since the entire body of all
> > URI (and XML) specs ever written do not say anything at all about what
> > it is that fragIDs must be used to refer to. And in that case,
> > http://www.example.org/#Dog is a class (of dogs). '#Dog' is an XML
> > element.
>
> Er, they do. That's what I just pointed out. According to the URI spec
> (and its references I cited) http://www.example.org/#Dog identifies the
> XML element (<rdf:Description rdf:about="#Dog">...</rdf:Description>).
> And according to the RDF spec that URI identifies a class. Which is it?
>


[[
The semantics of a fragment identifier is a property of the data
   resulting from a retrieval action, regardless of the type of URI used
   in the reference.  Therefore, the format and interpretation of
   fragment identifiers is dependent on the media type [RFC2046] of the
   retrieval result.
]]
4.1 http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2396.txt

I interpret

http://example.org/#Dog

identify an XML element when the media type is application/xml or text/xml

If you properly register application/rdf+xml you can define the same URI ref

http://example.org/#Dog

to identify _a Dog_ when the media type is application/rdf+xml

just because a resource representation is returned in XML format does not
mean that it must use the semantics of application/xml which is the exact
reason why it is great that we can indicate that a media type _is in XML
format_ with the "+xml" even though the fragment identifiers are defined to
identify something other than an XML element or attribute (e.g. something
abstract, a circle, an animal).

Jonathan

Received on Friday, 1 November 2002 07:08:56 UTC