RE: Clarifying what a URL identifies (Four Uses of a URL)

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Tim Bray [mailto:tbray@textuality.com] 
> Sent: Tuesday, January 21, 2003 1:02 PM
> To: Sandro Hawke
> Cc: Michael Mealling; David Booth; www-tag@w3.org; Roy T. 
> Fielding; Dan Connolly
> 
> 
> Sandro Hawke wrote:
> 
> > URIs are strings which are used for different things in different 
> > situations, in a manner controlled by the semantics of the 
> situation.
> 
> On the other hand, using the same URI to mean different 
> things is a Bad Thing and leads to confusion and misbehavior 
> not only at the Semantic Web level but in terms of general 
> human utility.  

No matter how forcefully you state it you cannot get around the fact
that people will use both http://www.25hoursaday.com to refer to me as a
person or to whatever representation is returned by Apache when an HTTP
GET is performed. It seems that you are implying that a Semantic Web
based on URIs is broken [as designed?]. 

> It's a formalism.  The Web Architecture has a formalism 
> called a "Resource" which is the one thing that corresponds 
> to each URI. 

This statement is meaningless and yet W3C TAG members keep repeating it.
What is the one resource that the URI "http://www.w3.org/Consortium/"
identifies? 

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knows absolutely everything about nothing.                            

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Received on Tuesday, 21 January 2003 16:34:49 UTC