RE: I-D ACTION:draft-daigle-uri-std-00.txt

At 10:38 AM 9/7/00 -0700, you wrote:
>You probably was told this definition of New York by some school teacher a
>long time ago or reading it in a book. Both are mechanisms for "resolving"
>a name and getting a definition for what the name means.

No, actually I lived in New York County (also known as the Borough of
Manhattan), New York City, New York State, for three years, and have lived
for 25 of my 29 years in New York State.  I've had more than enough
epistemology and language theory to appreciate the distinction between a
name and a thing and the perilous connections between them.

>On the Web, we do a GET on a URI and get back a description of what that
>resource is. In other words, the resource will tell you what kind of
>resource it is. Furthermore, it is possible for resources to describe
>other resources which also might be used to describe what kind a resource
>is. This is a perfectly consistent and decentralized world view.

Consistent tautologically, but contributing nothing as far as the meaning
of resource is concerned or for determining which resource - the namespace,
the Web page, or an abstract conception of XHTML - we're talking about.

Does http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml refer to that Web page alone?  I don't
think so.

>> >For "elements of the common syntax", the equality operation
>> is defined by
>> >RFC 2396. For everything else, you use case-sensitive matching.
>>
>> That's not specified anywhere I've seen, except in the
>> Namespaces in XML
>> Rec that got us into these problems in the first place.
>
>No, the XML-NS doesn't make it clear that the first part of the sentence
>is true.

It makes it clear that the second sentence is true.

>RFC 2396 specifies the equality rules for each common syntax element.

But it doesn't provide equality rules for URIs that don't use the common
syntax elements - and acknowledges the possibility of such cases.

Simon St.Laurent
XML Elements of Style / XML: A Primer, 2nd Ed.
XHTML: Migrating Toward XML
http://www.simonstl.com - XML essays and books

Received on Thursday, 7 September 2000 13:44:42 UTC