RE: Arch Doc: 26 September 2003 Editor's Draft (review ofsometerms)

Ian,
I snipped a bit to keep this short. As someone with an education in
physics and a training in law I sometimes want to know the _exact_
meaning of a sentence. 

<snip>...
</snip>
> I propose to change "that are" to ", which are".
> [Olivier says] Not sure what the underlying concept is that makes you
> say that Web resources _are_ interconnected. In what sense?

Interconnected via URI references. I must be missing what question
you are getting at.
[Olivier says] Well, this is probably not terribly important anyway. I
was just thinking that, yes resources _can_ be connected via URIs, but
are they or do they need to be? In theory, we could have several
islands, all of them obeying the same standards, but still not being
connected. But I guess the meaning of interconnected is that they are
obeying the same standards. I guess this is a side issue anyway.

<snip>...
</snip>

Only in that using the Web means agreeing to use (certain)
specifications. I'm not sure what part of the text implies
(in the general case) that a central authority determines
whether two URIs identify the same resource.
[Olivier says] I was obviously wrongly inferring that from what I
thought was being said between the lines. I'll read it again with your
comments in mind. 

<snip>...
</snip>

The authority can declare that uRi and UrI identify the same
resource. But when there's no way for an agent to determine 
the equivalence relationship by examining the URI alone in ways 
licensed by specifications, then the authority has made life
difficult for the agent. So we recommend against publication
of arbitrarily different URIs for the same resource. It seems
to impose a cost and offer no benefits.
[Olivier says] Agreed by URI alone with no standards -> chaos. I was
thinking of something like that an authority could publish some kind of
manifest (wsd.mf?) that says 'listen dear agent, I'll define for you now
in terms familiar to you how this and that in my realm is to be
understood and interpreted. Blah, blah...' 
<snip>...
</snip>

Norm Walsh and Dave Orchard are developing a TAG finding on these
topics. I look forward to addressing some of these questions in the 
Arch Doc but also pushing some discussion out to the finding.
[Olivier says] This will make interesting reading, I am sure. I am
looking forward to reading this and commenting on it 8)

 _ Ian
-- 
Ian Jacobs (ij@w3.org)   http://www.w3.org/People/Jacobs
Tel:                     +1 718 260-9447

Received on Thursday, 2 October 2003 17:27:10 UTC