Re: Editor's Draft of ISSUE-57 URI Usage Primer

On Wed, Oct 3, 2012 at 6:22 PM, John Kemp <john@jkemp.net> wrote:
> On Oct 3, 2012, at 4:49 PM, Jeni Tennison wrote:
>
>> Hi Noah, all,
>>
>> An editor's draft of the "URI Usage Primer" is available at:
>>
>>  http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/doc/uri-usage-primer-2012-10-03/
>
> I like the concept of "landing page" as being a page which "describes" something else.

Expect that this is an incorrect characterization. First, "landing
page" is a piece of language, not a concept. Those words, "landing
pages", can also mean pages intended to authenticate and then only
give access to those considered authorized to view a description, or
to intervene between when the user indicates that they wish to access
a resources in order to gain payment before granting access, or to
request or require information from the user in exchange for granting
them access.

The wikipedia page give a more realistic description of what the term
"landing page" means. Suggesting that is means something narrower,
particularly in a document that is intended for wide dissemination, is
asking for misunderstanding and confusion.

With words, it isn't what we like that matters. It is understanding
what is meant, which often take effort. One of the reasons for the use
of *identifiers* for the purposes of making assertions on the
*semantic web* is that there is a hope (a reasonable one) that
understanding the meaning (referent) of a URI can be easier that
understanding what a specific utterance a word means, something that
machines (and not all people) are not capable of. It would be good
practice in a document such as the proposed URI primer to make use of
the techniques that the document relates to (eat your own dogfood). So
define a URI to mean the class "landing page" and give a definition of
what it means to be one - the document does a fine job at that: "A
landing page is any page which contains a description of something
else.". Give it a label "landing page", and  annotate the label
assertion as coming from this document. Then use RDFa to annotate each
use of the term with the URI.  This would be considered good practice
when defining any entity type and linking it to a term in a language.
It would provide a way to disambiguate the use of the term from the
other meaning it is attached to, and to attach synonyms and
translations in a way that they can be found on the semantic web.

My understanding of David's position on this is that in the absence of
any logical assertions that constrained what the above-described URI
refers to, some application would be free to interpret the URI to
refer to whatever they want, for instance to mean what the wikipedia
page calls "transactional landing page".  I hope others can see how
taking that view is like saying "it's ok to ignore what Jeni meant
when she said 'landing page'".


-Alan

Received on Wednesday, 10 October 2012 15:50:06 UTC