RE: A little courtesy, please

:brick://us/ny/nyc/13%20%E.%203rd%20St.?side=east&course=11&seq=25

Now, if you can explain me how to access that particular brick via the
web...assuming of course we can agree on what referenced things are (we
could argue about where the brick stops being the brick and so on).

Sophistry aside, I think it's safe to say we are dealing with electronic
resources, and while there may be some kind of intuitive or commonsense
('obvious') correllation between things that are not in the web, such as the
entity John Cowan or Bill de hÓra or a particular brick, any representations
of these entities within the web that can be designated, as you say via the
URI scheme, are just that, representations of things, not the things
themselves. So we enter into a pretence that the electronic resource that
stands for brick is the brick for the purposes of electronic discourse. 

We are after all in the indirection business, and thus can be thankful that
we do not live in Plato's Republic, and should be prepared to engage in a
bit of reality hacking if needs be.


:> > A resource *is* abstract; the same resource can get a
:> > different entity body every time you access it, e.g.
:> > gopher://www.ccil.org:13/0.
:> 
:> I'm afraid I think this is just wrong. Dereferencing that URL
:> gets me a different entity body every time, but it's far from
:> clear that it gets me a different resource.

Indeed, it's winning approach to think of the resources as persistent in
time. There have been a lot of molecules replaced for other molecules in the
physical bodies of the participants of this list in the last 24 hours (with
pretty good morphological persistence I grant you), but I can conveniently
assume that these are the same people and will be the same people tommorrow.
In fact I would be concerned if such molecular tumult stopped :-)


-Bill

Received on Wednesday, 24 May 2000 04:59:47 UTC