- From: Jonathan Rees <jar@creativecommons.org>
- Date: Mon, 31 Mar 2008 14:58:55 -0400
- To: "Williams, Stuart (HP Labs, Bristol)" <skw@hp.com>
- Cc: Pat Hayes <phayes@ihmc.us>, "www-tag@w3.org" <www-tag@w3.org>
On Mar 31, 2008, at 1:48 PM, Williams, Stuart (HP Labs, Bristol) wrote: [...] > Is the answer not evident from the references is Felix Sasaki's > response? > http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-tag/2008Mar/0136 > A "latest version" URI, which identifies the most recently > published draft in a document series. >> No. Nothing tells me anything about *which* document series is involved, or provides me with any invariants over the elements of the series, or tells me the process by which new drafts are produced, or even what the past drafts were. So not only do I not know what the named entity *is*, I don't know much about it. There's little I can say about it that will be understood by someone reading what I say at an unknown future time. I don't know who is going to have written whatever the "most recently published draft" will be at the time my statements about it are read, or what the draft will be saying, or even what the draft will be about. The URI might be useful heuristically as a hyperlink ("see xxx to see a most recently published draft of the zzz working group's spec... probably") but I don't see how it's useful as a name to be used in discourse (e.g. RDF). If I do some detective work I may be able to figure out invariants such as the series's subject matter or working group affiliation (and the WG's charter), and if I do a *lot* of detective work I might find some piece of email or some minutes that say how the URI is going to be used, but before I get to that point I will have decided that it's not worth the effort to try to use or understand that URI. If I'm unfortunate enough to find that someone else has used it in communication with me, then I'll have to make assumptions (e.g. that the draft they were talking about is close enough to the one I see) or enter into dialog with them (which draft are you talking about? or what invariants do you know about the series that I don't know?) or attempt to verify what they say (since it is probably very easy to be wrong in making statements about things like this). Jonathan
Received on Monday, 31 March 2008 18:59:49 UTC