Re: New issue - Meaning of URIs in RDF documents

[Despite my best efforts, I'm posting.]

Tim Berners-Lee writes:
>And I am describing, if you like, a 
>perfect platonic design, to which we can aspire, though social and 
>engineering factors limit our ability to implement it perfectly.  Like 
>with all technical specs, the fact of imperfect adherence in some cases 
>does not detract from the importance of having made the perfect 
>idealistic design which has provable properties. One deals with 
>deviations from the perfect in a form of perturbation theory.

This seems like an enormous and dangerous deviation from the "let it
break" approach that catapulted the Web past the wreckage of so many
beautifully Platonic but sadly unworkable hypertext systems.  

Perhaps that approach qualifies as "perturbation theory", but I'd always
thought that the genius of the Web was that it simply didn't bother with
perfection, even especially at the URL/URI level.


-- 
Simon St.Laurent
Ring around the content, a pocket full of brackets
Errors, errors, all fall down!
http://simonstl.com -- http://monasticxml.org

Received on Wednesday, 16 July 2003 21:24:57 UTC