- From: pat hayes <phayes@ihmc.us>
- Date: Mon, 21 Jul 2003 12:04:37 -0500
- To: Tim Bray <tbray@textuality.com>
- Cc: Michael Mealling <michael@neonym.net>, www-tag@w3.org
>pat hayes wrote: > >>PS. Reading things like this makes me wonder whether you guys >>inhabit the same planet as the rest of us. Things with hearts and >>multiple interfaces, arranged in layers...?? What the hell are you >>talking about??? Here I am looking out of my window at an oak tree >>and I wonder if its a resource, and what its interfaces could be, >>and what layer it would be in.... > >If someone publishes an URI for it How could anyone tell whether a URI was 'for' an oak tree? You said it yourself: [PH] Am I identified by a URI? How could anyone possibly tell? [TB] You're right; the current web architecture provides no way to test this condition. >and, even better, provides representations (and even, better the >representations include audio and video and photos), then yes, that >oak tree is on the Web as far as I, or any software I write, can >tell. I doubt if you or anyone else could write software that could tell whether an oak tree was or was not connected with the Web in any way at all. At the very least, you would need to have a very advanced piece of visual recognition software; to get a particular tree you would need to have it incorporated into something that knew where it was and where it was looking at. You need something like a webcam linked to a GPS and a compass running an AI vision system that knew a lot about botany. But look, aside from this, your answer makes being 'on the Web' meaningless. Its not an architectural condition, obviously. It does not correspond to 'having a URI' since the URI could identify an image of the tree just as well as the tree itself; and in fact if the URI starts 'http:' and ends with a fragID then it is required to indicate an anchored place in an HTML document, not the thing 'denoted' - if there is a single such thing, which is extremely doubtful - by the picture or text found at that anchored location. What if the anchored location is a piece of text which describes an entire situation involving lots of entities? Which of them is THE resource that the URI is supposed to indicate? What if it is a picture of three trees? A drawing of Yggdrasil? Y'all need to get the story straight: you are trying to make URIs and this notion of 'indicates' do too many different things at the same time. Pat >-- >Cheers, Tim Bray > (ongoing fragmented essay: http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/) -- --------------------------------------------------------------------- IHMC (850)434 8903 or (650)494 3973 home 40 South Alcaniz St. (850)202 4416 office Pensacola (850)202 4440 fax FL 32501 (850)291 0667 cell phayes@ihmc.us http://www.ihmc.us/users/phayes
Received on Monday, 21 July 2003 13:04:40 UTC