Re: URIs and information typing

["W. E. Perry" <wperry@fiduciary.com>]

In addition to proclaiming this, you may--in fact, in developing processing
which uses XML-described data, you must--instantiate the same locally usable
form for equivalent data, regardless of differences in its provenance. At a
gritty nuts-and-bots level it is unavoidable that data submitted to and
extracted from local processes exhibit the bit representation of data expected
by the local processing environment (including most conspicuously endian
issues). The same is true of the bit representation even of text:  there is no
assurance that a local process recognizes or accommodates any particular
encoding. Given that, local equivalence reduces to acceptance, or not, of a
given concrete representation of data as valid input to a particular local
process. Therefore at the level where equivalence matters most--whether your
process can recognize and prepare various received instances of differing
provenance as suitable inputs to the same process--the quibbling distinction
between two URL references is meaningless.

Respectfully,

Walter Perry


Jonathan Borden wrote:

> This URI reference could just as easily resolve to a prose description of
> the "unsignedInt" basic datatype in a HTML document. The URI reference names
> an XML Schema unsignedInt regardless of what is retrieved from time to time
> at the end of the URI reference.
>
> And lest anyone misunderstand me, I am proclaiming as loudly and as often as
> I am given the opportunity, that there *ought* to be an explicit equivalence
> between the QName "xsd:unsignedInt" and the URI reference:
> http://www.w3.org/2000/10/XMLSchema#unsignedInt -- indeed I suppose you
> would correctly and strongly object if I suggested that this URI were to
> refer to the concept "string" in the XML Schema namespace. Aside from XML
> Schema in particular, XML in general (particularly on the Web) needs to have
> a unified view of QNames with respect to URI references.
>
> I'm going to invoke the law of common sense to state that the QName
> "xsd:unsignedInt" is equivalent to this URI reference.