Re: Is a namesapce a resource? - was: duck

On Tue, 6 Jun 2000, Tim Berners-Lee wrote:

> But more than that: the question if you take a step back is clearly absurd:
> "why can't a namespace be a mailbox?".  Just in natural langugae you
> can see that they are completely diffeernt concepts.

Well, I agree.  A namespace is not a piece of hypertext, or a mailbox,
or an interactive connection to an Internet host.  Yet an http: or mail:
or telnet: URI is syntactically valid as a namespace name.  I have
no problem with this, as I don't identify "name" with "URI" as properties,
any more than I think Greg Bear (the writer) is really a bear.

> You could say that it is like a person.  Normally a person is
> identified
> indirectly by a property such as a mailbox or a home page.
> In RDF, you can say that a person who has mailbox ora@w3.org has hair-color
> blond.  Which is good enough.  We could do that with namespaces.

Yes, indeed (see earlier posting).

> Through all this I am not exactly sure what your meaning of "document"
> is.  I could imagine a world in which resources were namespaces
> or documents or mailboxes and so on,  but I think I would find the term
> "document" difficult to define.

I understand "document" in a more or less dictionary sense: writing (or
recorded speech, or pictures, or whatever) intended to convey information
(see http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?va=document&book=Dictionary).

In that sense, a brick is not a document: it is not in the information-
conveying business.  A person is not a document either, nor a computer.
A printed book is a document, however, as is a painting.

> Once you have languages for talking about languages,
> then you cannot separate the system into layers of"documents",
> "metadocuments".

I agree.  But there is a still a ground-level distinction between
objects and information, bits and atoms, texts and things.

> You could argue that the HTML document is not actually the list,
> but is some information about the list.

Well, "list" is a rather polysemous word, like "book":  we say both
"I have written a book" (bits) and "Pass me that book" (atoms).  The
latter is perspicuous even if the book's pages are blank.

> It is a rather arbitrary subset
> of the information, perhaps, just as a schema is an arbitrary subset
> of information about a namespace.

Exactly!  And anyway, a schema (or an XML Schema) anyway, characterizes
not a namespace, but a class of XML documents; the documents in the class
may contain elements and attributes from many namespaces.
See http://www.w3.org/TR/xmlschema-1/ , clause 1.1.

> After all, if you set your browser preferences to French, who knows what
> will happen.

I just tried:  c'est le meme texte, alas!

> Maybe it is that the concept of self-describing documents just does not
> exist for many people.  While I can understand that not everyone would
> put their energy I had not anticipated that there would be an actual
> resistance
> to identifying namespcaes as resources.

I don't think that there is so much resistance to namespaces as
resources, but rather to namespace names as designators for those
resources.  The "other school" believes that by the terms of the
Namespace Rec, namespace names are simple strings that adopt URI-reference
syntax for convenience only, rather than URI references as such.

-- 
John Cowan                                   cowan@ccil.org
	"You need a change: try Canada"  "You need a change: try China"
		--fortune cookies opened by a couple that I know

Received on Tuesday, 6 June 2000 14:31:09 UTC