Re: Terminology (was Re: article on URIs, is this material that can be used by the)

Pat Hayes wrote:

> OK,lets try that. I want to make a hypertext link to Julius Caesar. So I 
> write this:
> 
> <a href="http://Julius Caesar">The great Roman emperor</a>
> 
> Well, that was easy. Now, do I have a hypertext link to J.C.?
> 
> Remember, what you and the cited text say is that HAVING A NAME enables 
> the creation of the link. You didn't say that name had to do anything 
> other than refer, and my name does refer to J.C.. BUt I don't think I 
> have a hyperlink to him (in fact, I don't quite know how anyone could 
> set up a hyperlink to the actual guy himself.)

On that last point, my understanding of HTTP-range-14 is that redirects 
are to be expected if we make links directly with URIs of 
"non-information-resource" resources. Which apparently include RDF 
classes and properties, so
<a href="http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/Person">The class Person in FOAF</a>
is analagous to that aspect of your example, except that in the case of 
RDF terms, the idea of an authoritative representation makes more sense 
than in the case of a long-dead person.

On your main point, use of "pure" names in HTML hypertext, you might be 
interested in this paper from Andy Powell a few years ago. It shows some 
practical deployment experience with URNs, made resolvable through use 
of HTTP caching infrastructure (which can be made available or even 
imposed at an institutional network level, without requiring new browser 
software).
http://www.dlib.org/dlib/june98/06powell.html

"By using this experimental system it is possible for staff at UKOLN to 
type DOI based URNs directly into the Location window of their Netscape 
Navigator browsers."

The example used Netscape 4, I'm not sure how more recent browsers behave.

cheers,

Dan

Received on Thursday, 28 June 2007 07:41:52 UTC