A little courtesy, please

I am growing increasingly short-tempered at some of the shabby rhetoric
being used in this debate.  For those to whom this is not completely obvious,
it is possible to be very nervous about applying full URI semantics to 
namespace names without:

- being against URIs
- being against relative URIs
- being against having dictionaries in libraries
- being against RDF [* see below]
- being against the Web Architecture

This kind of argument is unworthy of those advancing it and might tend
(dangerously) to cause the short-tempered to blow off the rest of the
points they are trying to make.  Hard though this may be to believe, it
is possible to be worried, as stated above, about forcing full URI
semantics on these things, and at the same time, to be worried about
Dan's two-bats conundrum or about the fact that the following, as namespace
names, are not equivalent per the namespace rec.

 http://foo.bar/a/b 
 HTTP://foo.bar/a/./b

So, like, guys, we understand what you're saying.  

The fact that any of us are still reading this river of tears, 383 messages 
in, should serve as evidence enough that we care a lot about figuring out 
what the right thing to do is and how to do it.   -Tim

[* re RDF] - the notion that sticking to what the namespace rec says 
tends to destroy RDF is just totally 100% incontrovertably vacuous.
RDF has chosen to say that when you're in RDF space, namespace names
have to be used in a particular way.  Some of us may have trouble with
the syntax engineering (#, feh) and some of us may worry that the RDF
way doesn't provide enough indirection, but nothing they do contravenes 
the namespace spec in spirit or in letter.  And just to be consistent: I 
think that anyone who's using RDF and starts using relative namespace 
names is just asking for trouble.  Because, among other reasons, RDF is 
(I hope) going to end up embedded in lots of other XML vocabularies and 
shipped around the Web in unpredictable ways. -T.

Received on Tuesday, 23 May 2000 02:32:40 UTC