Re: My action item on Moby Dec, issue 14, etc

/ Tim Bray <tbray@textuality.com> was heard to say:
[...]
| To take these up in order:
|
| (a) I could easily synthesize a URI that when dereferenced,
| alternately returned representations of the current weather in Oaxaca
| and pictures of my adorable cat Bodoni.  I could, whenever the whimsy
| struck me, change one of the alternate representation generators to
| whatever struck my whimsy that day. This URI simply does not in any
| practical sense identify a single anything.

I like what you wrote, Tim, and you might be right, but I think you've
made a small error here at the beginning and it's not obvious to me
without more thought how much of the rest hangs on this error.

The error, I think, is that you've brought representations into the
picture. The important part about "Absolute URI references are
unambiguous: Each absolute URI reference unambiguously identifies one
resource." isn't the consistency of the representations you can
dereference, it's the fact that they're fully qualified and globally
unique. That's why we can paint them on billboards, write them on
busses, and flash them in commercials.

If I tell you to go to

  http://www.antarctica.net/jobs.html

you know exactly what I mean. From Vancouver to Boston to China.

                                        Be seeing you,
                                          norm

-- 
Norman.Walsh@Sun.COM    | Wisdom is only a comparative quality, it will
XML Standards Architect | not bear a single definition.--Marquess of
Sun Microsystems, Inc.  | Halifax

Received on Thursday, 19 September 2002 11:28:26 UTC