- From: John Cowan <jcowan@reutershealth.com>
- Date: Thu, 25 May 2000 15:25:08 -0400
- To: abrahams@acm.org
- CC: "Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@simonstl.com>, xml-uri@w3.org
"Paul W. Abrahams" wrote: > [T]hough we may be able to say > definitively that two URI refer to the same thing, we can never say > definitively that they refer to different things unless we compare the > resources themselves. Even that does not suffice. There is simply no way based on URIs(*) alone to tell if two URIs refer to the same thing or not. You can only draw that conclusion from some authoritative source of meta-information. Concretely, if you access two URIs and get the same entity body, that proves nothing; they might be only coincidentally the same. If you access two URIs and get different entity bodies, that proves nothing: they might be the same time-varying resource. (*) I think the plural of "URI" is "URIs" despite 2396, just as I think the plural of "euro" is "euros". -- Schlingt dreifach einen Kreis um dies! || John Cowan <jcowan@reutershealth.com> Schliesst euer Aug vor heiliger Schau, || http://www.reutershealth.com Denn er genoss vom Honig-Tau, || http://www.ccil.org/~cowan Und trank die Milch vom Paradies. -- Coleridge (tr. Politzer)
Received on Thursday, 25 May 2000 15:26:03 UTC