- From: Jonathan Borden <jonathan@openhealth.org>
- Date: Tue, 1 Oct 2002 20:07:23 -0400
- To: "Paul Prescod" <paul@prescod.net>, "Norman Walsh" <Norman.Walsh@Sun.COM>
- Cc: <www-tag@w3.org>
Paul Prescod wrote: > > Norman Walsh wrote: > >... > > > >I have to say that an applet like this seems like a really good > >example of something that isn't the sort of thing I'd point to with an > >XLink. That just doesn't smell like a hypertext reference to me. > > Can someone please explain the virtue of trying to distinguish between > "hypertext links" and "other links"? To me it sounds not only > meaningless but actually harmful to the development of real-world software. ... > > Does this mean that every URI is a hyperlink? No. A URI is a hyperlink > if its referent is supposed to be retrievable or otherwise accessible. > So namespace URIs are not links unless a future namespace specification > says that namespace documents MUST be provided. Links to stylesheets are > hyperlinks. Links to schemas are hyperlinks. References to abstract > concepts are not. > > Or to say it another way, a "hyper"-link is an assertion of relationship > between two Web-retrievable resources. > This seems to be a reasonable way to distinguish "link" from "anyURI" but gosh, this entire argument, which mystifies me somewhat then comes down to some simple assertion:s foo:link rdfs:domain uri:Retrievable . foo:link rdfs:range uri:Retrievable . which basically says that something that is a "foo:link" is a property of a "uri:Retrievable" resource and whose value is a "uri:Retrievable" resource. Which underscores the fact that RDF is a good generalization of all this stuff. With RDF you can express any semantics desired by e.g. the HTML WG with HLink etc. Why not just use XHTML+RDF, and the HTML WG develop a particular terminology which expresses its needs? Surely we don't need yet another syntax for asserting relationships between URIs -- we really should be developing reusable solutions -- which is the whole point of discussing "web architecture". Jonathan http://www.openhealth.org http://www.jonathanborden-md.com http://www.erieneuroscience.org
Received on Tuesday, 1 October 2002 20:25:31 UTC