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I've been thinking about the kind of processing I do with XML.
Nearly all of it involves matching against patterns. Some of it
involves simple less-than/greater-than work with position.
I think the largest concrete problem I have with URIs is their lack of a
common mechanism for saying this equals that. I can live without
ordering for names, so that's not a big deal, but the lack of clarity on
things like:
HTTP://MONASTICXML.COM
vs.
http://monasticxml.com
vs.
http://monasticXML.com
is pretty much killing, even without issues of relative and absolute,
query strings, etc. I don't see this getting better in the near future,
as IRI issues and questions about escaping appear to be growing, not
resolving.
The lack of clarity - heck, the outright refusal to acknowledge the
question - about how to get from an identifier to a resource or back
again - is the nails in the coffin.
It seems on the face of it to be a poor match for a system which depends
at its foundations on identifying and recognizing labels.
Maybe it's time to ask if "SGML for the Web" is getting poisoned by some
folks' notion of the Web, even while it succeeds regularly in expanding
(often questionably) in expanding many people's concrete experience and
understanding of the Web.
--
Simon St.Laurent
Ring around the content, a pocket full of brackets
Errors, errors, all fall down!
http://simonstl.com
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