Re: I-D ACTION:draft-daigle-uri-std-00.txt (nouns)

Graham Klyne wrote:
> 
> At 01:21 PM 9/7/00 -0400, Simon St.Laurent wrote:
> >It's clear what that URI represents.
> 
> [allowing that you meant to say "NOT clear" ...]
> 
> What does a noun represent?
> 
> This is not a facile question.  I think answers to that question may be
> illuminating.
> 
> I suggest that a URI serves the same purpose in web architecture that a
> noun serves in the architecture of most human languages.

Quite.

(Masinter makes a similar point in his
message of Thu, 22 Jun 2000 08:53:05 -0700
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/xml-uri/2000Jun/0817.html )

Is that the sort of thing that we should add
to RFC2396 (i.e. a revision of it or
whatever)? Would that help?

It has very little bearing on how one should
construct software to deal with URIs, but
it might help with understanding. It might,
for example, prevent folks from coming
up with a scheme name like "mailto" again
(it should have been mailbox: or some
such nounish thingy.)

Larry Masinter made some half-joke a while
back about an intro-to-philosophy being
a pre-requisite to URI discussions. Maybe
it's not such a joke after all? Maybe
it's worth putting in the spec?

Ah... there it is:

Philosphy 101
Mon, 5 Jun 2000 09:05:31 -0700
mid:NDBBKEBDLFENBJCGFOIJEEAGCNAA.masinter@attlabs.att.com
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/xml-uri/2000Jun/0227.html

I saw Mogul et. al. re-hash most of the
basics of distributed computing in internet
drafts about HTTP caching. I think a lot
of it actually ended up in the HTTP spec...
yup:

http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec13.html#sec13.2

There are no assumptions that the reader
understands about treating time as a partial,
rather than total, order in distributed
systems. It's all spelled out in detail,
right down to the psuedo-code.

Is that what's called for? re-hashing
all the stuff about definite descriptions,
morning-star/evening-star stuff, and all that?

-- 
Dan Connolly, W3C http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/

Received on Thursday, 7 September 2000 14:54:30 UTC