RE: now://example.org/car (was lack of consensus on httpRange-14)

x
> Exactly. By this time next year there may well be a REC-RDDL.
> All of the
>   http namespaces that the W3C has created will point to RDDL files
> which will give all kinds of useful information (both human
> readable and
> machine readable) for those URIs. Whereas all of those
> urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office URIs will never be
> dereferencable. It is at least possible that this will prevent those
> namespaces from participating in important and widely
> deployed discovery
> mechanisms in the future.

But won't the authors of the the http namespaces now want client software to
do something with the REC-RDDL file?  And how will they get the client
software to now do the right thing?  Presumably the authors of namespace
names that use rddl files will want the client software to do something
different that it's currently been doing.  I think the problem that I have
is when people say "suddenly the URI is dereferenceable" and it's like poof,
magic, http fairy-dust and suddenly the author gets the right stuff to
happen by putting a file there.  Something than just making the URI
dereferencable has to happen, and how that is to be broadcast is what
bothers me.

> The abstractness or concreteness of a thing *is not constant* and
> therefore should not be embedded into the things name. So
> that's why I
> do not think that "now:" is the right thing.
>
>   Paul Prescod
>
>

This seems like a most succinct summary.  And it still causes me confusion.

Given the lack of constantness, how does a user of a thing know when it
changes from one form to another?  Presumably we want the software to do
different behaviour depending upon whether it's concrete or abstract.  And
the only tool we have is the name.  And changing the name means that
software and humans will have a chance at knowing to do things differently.

I'd love to come up with a great real-world example of why we want
identifier changes when the thing concretizes, but I don't appear to have
had enough coffee this morning :-)

Cheers,
Dave

Received on Thursday, 10 October 2002 15:39:04 UTC