Re: resources and URIs

On Wed, 2003-07-16 at 23:43, Tim Berners-Lee wrote:
> On Tuesday, Jul 15, 2003, at 19:20 US/Eastern, pat hayes wrote:
> > and the universes of discourse may contain entities which
> > cannot possibly be all identified or even referred to by URIs, since
> > there are too many of them, or it is physically impossible to identify
> > them with enough precision, or simply because it is impractical to do
> > so.
>
> No one said that there was a URI for every resource.  It is quite a
> different thing to say that *any* resource can have a URI (which is
> true) as to say that *every* resource has a URI.  The system does not
> require that every resource has a URI. 

IMHO, this is a dangerous step to take and really depends on a
clarification that probably needs to be made within 2396bis and possibly
the web architecture document. There is one spot in 2396 that suggests,
not explicitly, that resources exist before they are 'bound' (my word,
I've also seen 'minted' used which also seems to work for me) to a URI.
Many systems outside of the typical W3C membership's experience use URIs
and have extreme trouble dealing with things that aren't already
identified by a URI. I suggested this at the 2396bis BOF and it seemed a
good idea at the time: is it possible to concretely constrain the term
'resource' as used in 2396 so that a 'resource' only comes into
existence once a URI is assigned to it (i.e. it becomes part of the
Web)? Then we could create another term for those things that could
become resources if a URI were assigned? I think that language
clarification would really help....

-MM

Received on Thursday, 17 July 2003 10:59:08 UTC