RE: yet another sidetrack on what a URI identifies

> In any case, the reason we had this discussion originally is because
> some people were complaining about xmlns identifiers being http URIs
> because they believed that a URI could not be both a name and a way
> of retrieving a web page.  They are wrong, as demonstrated repeatedly
> by working practice and the REST model, because they were ignoring
> the difference between a URI and a GET action on a URI.

That may be true for some folks, but some of us simply had a problem
with ambiguity of xmlns URIs being presumed to denote schemas, models,
vocabularies, and other resources which are far more than "sets of
names" and if a namespace URI denotes that namespace, then I would not 
consider an XML Schema, or RDF Schema, or RDDL document as a valid
representation of that namespace, since they all invariably include
a great deal more than embodied by the namespace itself, which is,
after all just a simple set of names that infers no semantics, structure,
or expectation of usage on those names. 

Dereferencing a namespace URI and getting a RDDL document or XML Schema
is like having a URI that denotes Paris, and getting a "representation"
that also includes all the information about Europe as well.

Patrick

Received on Wednesday, 15 January 2003 04:40:31 UTC