Re: Attribute uniqueness test: a radical proposal

>TimBL initiated this whole brouhaha because he was disturbed about the
>failure of namespace names to identify useful retrievable information.

I'm not sure that _was_ Tim's intent.

My understanding is that what he's driving at is more abstract -- the
concept that a namespace, to have an "identity" in the Web world, should
have a URI. Whether that URI can be dereferenced, or ever is dereferenced,
is actually a secondary matter; this is a statement about how the names of
things are to be managed, and has to do with meta-issues such as
"ownership" defined by some classes of URIs. Making the namespace's
identity be a URI taps into that work.

If we accept that premise, then the assertion that a URI Reference really
ought to be a reference to a family of URIs (with the specific one selected
at the time that the reference is examined, in context) makes a bit more
sense. It explains the fact that ..\light lights a bulb in one case and a
fuse in another as being an _intentional_ result of the decision to use a
context-dependent reference in the first place. The answer "if it hurts
when you do that, don't do that" really is consistant with this model.

Of course, making sense, being desirable, and being wise may be three very
different things.
______________________________________
Joe Kesselman  / IBM Research

Received on Wednesday, 7 June 2000 09:00:37 UTC