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

On Thu, 7 Sep 2000, Dan Connolly wrote:
> In your example...
> 
> >  My contention
> > is that
> > 
> >         ftp://ftp.unicode.org/Public/MAPPINGS/ISO/8859-1.TXT
> > 
> > and
> > 
> >         http://www.unicode.org/Public/MAPPINGS/ISO/8859-1.TXT
> > 
> > represent the same *resource*, not merely the same entity body.
> > Both URIs refer to the mapping between the Unicode and ISO 8859-1
> > character sets.
> > 
> > Or at least that this could be so, if the Unicode Consortium said
> > it was so.
> 
> Hmm... if two things are identical, they're identical
> in every possible respect. If unicode.org turned off
> its ftp server and left its http server running one day,
> then you could observe a difference between what
> the two URIs above denote. That suggests to me that
> the resources are distinct.


Doesn't follow. http://www.w3.org/XML/ is serviced by many different http
servers, some of which fall over on rare occasion. Some of which might
listen on other ports too. Nevertheless we claim that
http://www.w3.org/XML/ names one Web resource. The ports and protocols
stuff is the practical business that lets us go to the Web and acquire
renderings of URI-named resources.

One possible story is that http: and ftp: are two ways of
asking the Web about the self-same resource. Since you don't ever get the
resource, only its renderings-as-entities when talking via http: and
ftp:, we can still claim that 
         ftp://ftp.unicode.org/Public/MAPPINGS/ISO/8859-1.TXT
and
         http://www.unicode.org/Public/MAPPINGS/ISO/8859-1.TXT

name one-and-the-same resource. The names (URIs) are of course
non-identical.

I'm puzzled, finding it harder than expected to see this from your
perspective. When you make sweeping claims like...

>       if two things are identical, they're identical
> in every possible respect. 

... I half expect you to followup with 'the morning star isn't the evening
star because they've got different names'.

Dan 

(remembering why he bailed out of a Philosophy Phd to hack Web stuff instead)

Received on Thursday, 7 September 2000 15:47:18 UTC