Re: Attribute uniqueness test: a radical proposal

At 10:55 PM 2000-06-06 -0400, keshlam@us.ibm.com wrote:
>
>>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.

[Clearly I don't speak for Tim.  But I have spoken in this discussion, and]

I view this as an echo demonstrating understanding.  Joe is at least
convincing me that he is hearing.

On the substantive questions raised by Joe's trailing comment, I would offer:

The core syntax is too sweeping an instrument to be the place to save
people from themselves.  Trying to save people from [redefinable names
risks] at the superficial syntax level of the present Namespaces [extent of
definition] is unwise.  I have seen it tried in Ada and clearly that
attempt went too far.  The _succes de scandal_ of the WWW is arguably based
on how weak the language of the Web is.

If markup language tries to go too far to clean up the wisdom or
rationality of human communication, it will just lose market share.  

[Yes I want to make the common use of XML and its use on the Web more
semantic and more rational.  But I see the only win-plan in this regard as
an action in HCI space, not the formal structure of the markup apart from
the entrained informal content and not apart from the HCI process by which
the human information source selects markup by which to reinforce their
natural content.  I say this despite how fervently my "clients c/o the WAI"
wish that people would post more rational web pages.  I don't think we can
succeed except by inviting the authors to cooperate in making their pages
clearer (over a range of presentation options).]

Al

>______________________________________
>Joe Kesselman  / IBM Research
>

Received on Wednesday, 7 June 2000 09:52:42 UTC