Re: Attribute uniqueness test: a radical proposal

-----Original Message-----
From: keshlam@us.ibm.com <keshlam@us.ibm.com>
To: XML-uri@w3.org <XML-uri@w3.org>
Date: Wednesday, June 07, 2000 10:04 AM
Subject: 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.


Absolutely, well put - thank you, Joe.

>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.


There are only very specific times when relative URIs are used (within a
set of closely coupled URI-neighboring resources).  The way most people are
thinking of
using namespaces on this list, namespaces are few and not managed with
documents
and so relative URI references make no sense.

However, it is a very wise architect who can forsee all uses of a general
technology
so well in advance so as to be able to determine what sort of features are
unwise
for all future applications.  I have given one example of a system in which
the
database namespace, and the database data are very closely coupled
and so relative adderssing makes sense.  I would not like to rule out others
either.

The only problem we have is that some people say they have been using the
relative URI-reference syntax but *not*  for its relative URI meaning, and
that
the relative URI meaning would break the systems.  We have yet to see
concrete examples
(though I have 130 messages unread ...)

______________________________________
>Joe Kesselman  / IBM Research
>

Received on Wednesday, 7 June 2000 14:22:33 UTC