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

David Orchard wrote:
>
> I find this argument amazingly compelling.  I've been waiting for somebody
> to synthesize this into something that my more mortal brain can
understand.
> Thanks.
>
> Cheers,
> Dave
>
> > Spin it another way: the URI, and the representations you can (maybe)
> > get with it, are all there is.  There is no point in arguing
> > about the
> > fundamental nature of what the URI identifies and what the
> > representations represent, because (a) you can never know, and (b) it
> > doesn't matter.
> >
>

This is how I see it:

This _entire_ controversy exists simply because the meaning of the term
"resource" is hopelessly overloaded, perhaps "URI" is as well.

Let's use different language and see how it flies:

A URIref is a _label_ for a _node_. Each URIref uniquely and unambiguously
labels the node. Not all nodes are required to have labels. Nodes may have
properties and these properties may relate one node to another.

Now suppose that these nodes just somehow exist, represented in some
database somewhere and let's suppose that these nodes might have labels and
that the labels consist of a string of characters having a given syntax..

One day, someone brings in a new box and attaches it to the node database.
This box accepts tickets that contain, among other things, the label for a
particular node. When you insert the ticket into the box, out pops a
printout describing the labelled node. The ticket allows you to specify
whether you want the description in English, Spanish, French and a few other
languages (this is an example of one of the other things that one might put
on a ticket).

Let's consider this ultrasimplistic view of the Web, perhaps something like
a Turing machine for the Web. I assert that one can construct the actual
Web, modulo processing speeds, time delays etc., from such a machine.

Jonathan

Received on Friday, 20 September 2002 08:58:00 UTC