Re: URIs, used in RDF, that do not have associated documentation

> On Mar 30, 2012, at 7:24 PM, トーレ　エリクソン wrote:
>> <rant>My problem is that people assume that the default case is that the
>> HTML document "resides" (I don't know a better word, hope you understand
>> what I mean) on the other end of the wire, when it might just exist
>> locally through the octet stream.</rant>

2012/4/1 Pat Hayes <phayes@ihmc.us>:
> <rant> My problem is that some people are incredibly sensitive to things like the piddling difference between a document versus a byte stream, when at the same time they are quite happy to treat them as being in the same category as galaxies and dead Roman emperors and Platonic abstractions. There ought to be a name for this, we could call it http tunnel vision: a condition where everything in every possible universe looks like a very small piece of network architecture. </rant>

Excuse me for being a piddling pedant with tunnel vision, but I though
we *were* discussing how network architecture affects RDF. The RDF and
the HTTP universes are, by design, very similar. Neither cares what a
resource *is*. They leave that part to the user. If the distinction
between galaxies and documents is that important, then why doesn't the
RDF specification mention it? Instead it defines a class for all
resource that can be mapped to a unicode string. Literals are there to
solve an important technical problem when serializing RDF. Likewise,
octet streams are an essential part of HTTP. A lot of people, even in
this forum, mixes up "1" and "1"^^xsd:integer. This doesn't matter
most of the time, but I suspect it would bother you (it bothers me) if
people make this mistake when discussing RDF semantics.
Representations/octet streams are not just a very small piece of HTTP
architecture, they are the messages in a message passing protocol.

Tore

Received on Sunday, 1 April 2012 09:46:37 UTC