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Dare Obasanjo wrote: > > I know this may sound like a chicken and egg question but is the reason peopl > expect something to be at the URI because most examples of namespace usage by > the W3C and others involve HTTP URLs? My guess: a "URI" is (or was originally) a generalized term for "URLs" (resource locators), "URNs" (resource names), and "URCs" (resource characteristics). "URCs" never took off because nobody could figure out what they should be, and there has been resistance to using "URNs" because, ironically, they can't be resolved. (This is ironic because the chief distinguishing feature between Names and Locators is that the former are not *meant* to be dereferenced.) So common practice has been to use URLs even for things where URNs would be more appropriate (XML namespace names, RDF resources, etc.). Since the principle purpose of a URL is to *locate* a *resource*, it's not suprising that people expect to find something at the other end of one. Opinions differ on this of course. In the Semantic Web world there is no distinction between the resource itself and the thing used to Identify it; the idea there seems to be that everything important can be done simply by expressing relations among resources without anybody ever actually retrieving and displaying anything. --Joe English jenglish@f...
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