- From: Pat Hayes <phayes@ihmc.us>
- Date: Mon, 31 Mar 2008 15:48:27 -0500
- To: Jonathan Rees <jar@creativecommons.org>
- Cc: "Williams, Stuart (HP Labs, Bristol)" <skw@hp.com>, "www-tag@w3.org" <www-tag@w3.org>
At 2:58 PM -0400 3/31/08, Jonathan Rees wrote: >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, er... the one all of whose drafts have the same title? >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. You can trace this through the 'previous version' links. In fact, that might be the best way to define such a series: go to the latest version, then iterate back through the previous versions. >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). Well, we can make some assertions about it, such as that its a W3C TR 'draft series', and it was begun on a certain date, and its the product of a certain WG, and so on. > >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. Why is this URi any worse in this respect than, say, the URI which identifies the Working Group itself? >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). You seem (?) to be presuming that one can make useful assertions only about actual documents, but I don't see the rationale for this assumption. Pat > >Jonathan -- --------------------------------------------------------------------- IHMC (850)434 8903 or (650)494 3973 home 40 South Alcaniz St. (850)202 4416 office Pensacola (850)202 4440 fax FL 32502 (850)291 0667 cell http://www.ihmc.us/users/phayes phayesAT-SIGNihmc.us http://www.flickr.com/pathayes/collections
Received on Monday, 31 March 2008 20:49:13 UTC