xml-dev - RE: URI concerns continue

["Bullard, Claude L (Len)" <clbullar@ingr.com>]

Here's a fun question:  a person 
is born on September 6, 1950 and died on 
September 6, 1990.  What is their current age?

It depends on the system semantic.  URLs as 
names of abstractions are forced to carry a 
dual semantic.  SGML chose to separate 
these for reasons of the issues of establishing 
a record of authority independent of the system 
used to resolve a location for that record. 

XML chose to conflate identity, name and location 
to insist that WWW systems establish the record of authority 
dependent on the system.

Len Bullard
Intergraph Public Safety
clbullar@ingr.com
http://fly.hiwaay.net/~cbullard/lensongs.ram

Ekam sat.h, Vipraah bahudhaa vadanti.
Daamyata. Datta. Dayadhvam.h


-----Original Message-----
From: Simon St.Laurent [mailto: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.