RE: yet another sidetrack on what a URI identifies

It is a name associated to a function: retrograde GUI.

Links are names + functions or in the oldespeak, a link and 
a locator.  It gets messier if one really digs down to 
the level of the actual thing retrieved and deals with 
the semantic of locating within a type, eg, a bitmap area
locator vs any one of the different kinds of markup 
locators.

The complaints about URIs in XMLNS are well-taken, 
not wrong.  You are only worried that a thing work 
if it is interpreted in all of your terms and these 
are implemented consistently.  Ok so far, but the
reality is the GUI thinks it a URI IS a link 
and therefore, when it sees the URI, it 
automatically enables the function.  

So the user is confused.  The W3C confuses them.

Your theory is consistent; its implementations 
aren't.  You will be explaining that as long as 
names used as disambiguating syntax are identical 
to names paired with functions for locating and 
retrieving representations of resources.

len

-----Original Message-----
From: Roy T. Fielding [mailto:fielding@apache.org]

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.

Received on Wednesday, 15 January 2003 09:31:05 UTC