xml-dev - Re: URI concerns continue

["Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@simonstl.com>]

At 10:45 PM 7/10/00 -0500, Dan Connolly wrote:
>It is a common misconception that URIs are identifiers of entity
>bodies, but in the standard terminology, URIs are identifiers
>of abstractions:
>	[...def...]
>	http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2396.txt
>
>Hence if anyone is hijacking terms, it is those that claim that
>URIs are other than identifiers of abstractions.

You can say that as often as you like, but it's clear that URIs - if only
because they build on URLs - come with additional expectations about the
retrievable or not retrievable nature of the resource they identify.  

It's also clear, from your own push, for instance, to place schemas as the
entity bodies retrieved from namespace URI locations, that URIs are not
'simple' identifiers, and that the information at the entity body may be
expected to participate in some form in transactions where the URI was
identifying something more abstract.

Does your placement of schemas at namespace URIs make you a hijacker?  I'd
say it very well might.

>Clearly there is no particular entity body that, for
>example, http://www.slashdot.org/ identifies. It identifies
>"the home page of a geek periodical/forum" which has
>different entity-body representations at different time.

I think we all have a reasonable understanding of what to expect from
Slashdot - but no understanding of what role that might play in the
namespace xmlns="http://www.slashdot.org".

>In some cases, the abstraction is a static entity body.
>http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2396.txt is such an example.
>But this is not the general rule -- it is a special case.

It's not even the general rule that there is an entity body.  In fact, I'm
not sure that there is a general rule beyond the existence of the syntax.

This doesn't seem like an appropriate foundation for the kinds of
non-retrieval tasks URIs are being asked to do in various (namespace,
schema, XLink) XML contexts.

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