Re: "tdb" and "duri" URI schemes...

On Sat, Nov 6, 2010 at 2:23 AM, Larry Masinter <masinter@adobe.com> wrote:
> Halloween is over, but I can still raise a specter of an
> indescribable thing -- I can't describe the costume,
> though.
>
> Some things have unique, short descriptions:
> short enough to be practical to write within the payload
> of a media resource, comprehensible enough for a person
> to read, view listen to, make sense of, and interpret,
> and unique, in that the description distinguishes the
> thing from every other thing that also has such a
> description.
>
> Not "every" thing can be practically described in such
> a way.

example?

> Of course, I can't really tell you which things those are.

then why are we talking about them?

> But I know that there are infinitely many things which
> cannot be described in such a way.

Why does it matter to someone trying to use an RFC how many things
there are or how many descriptions there are?  To assert that there
are infinitely many things, or descriptions, or to comment on their
relative numbers, is to stick your ontological nose out for no reason,
and cut you off from audiences who don't share your assumptions.

> I can describe "the set of real numbers between 3 and 4,
> inclusive"  and I can describe "the real number pi", but
> I know there must be real numbers between 3 and 4 which
> do not have short, unique descriptions, since there are
> more of the former than there are of the latter.

This assumes that the assignment of descriptions to things is
completely determined already. That's not the case in URI space, yet.

But it just doesn't matter. Considerations like this can't affect
deployment and have no place in an RFC.

It's your document, and obviously you can ignore me. Publishing with
this nonsense is better than not publishing.

> Perhaps this isn't a big or important point in the definition
> of "tdb", but I think it's an interesting one, don't you?

Not really, sorry, not in this forum. If you want to talk about
intuitionism and platonism and empiricism and model theory and that
sort of thing, that's great, but let's take it somewhere else.

> I'll add something about this to the document; I can see
> that I need to cover the practical aspects of description
> as a means of identification.

Practical is good, but this smells like a rathole to me.

Jonathan

Received on Saturday, 6 November 2010 14:11:42 UTC