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

>However the main motivation for "make absolute" appears to be the
>view that the namespace _is_ the resource identified by the URI used
>as the namespace name.

Tim's said "no", and I beleive him. The main motivation for "make absolute"
is to make the URI itself be the Namespace Name, in order to bring
namespace names under the same management policies as other uses of URIs.
For example, if URIs under a particular scheme must have registered owners,
namespaces which use that kind of URI as their name would have to follow
the same practice and have a registered owner.

The question of whether there is a resource retrievable via that name
really is a completely independent issue. I think our tendency to conflate
the two is one of the reasons everyone has had trouble understanding why
the Absolutize advocates favor that solution -- and why they have so much
trouble understanding the Literal solution in turn.

I freely grant that this is unintuitive to those of us who think the
purpose of a URI is to actively access a resource rather than to passively
represent a resource.

>forbid is much much better than undefined.

I'd agree if Forbid was actually acceptable to everyone. There was some
evidence that it wasn't. If making it undefined breaks the logjam, I think
I'd have to support that approach -- pending reports from the other W3C
groups confirming that this doesn't cause excessive breakage for them.

>I think using URIs at all as names was probably not that good an idea
>given that they are not supposed to be dereferenced,

See above; the two points are seperable. Using URI _references_, which
opened the door to the relative syntax, was unintentional and -- I think --
probably a mistake. What we're trying to do now is deal with that mistake.


Airplane Pilot's Rule: "If lost, climb and confess."

______________________________________
Joe Kesselman  / IBM Research

Received on Friday, 9 June 2000 14:13:57 UTC