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Sorry -- repost. Eudora did something odd with the previous try... At 19:38 21/01/2002 +0000, Miles Sabin wrote: >Jonathan Borden wrote, > > It seems to me that the benefit of HTTP is that it allows the > > 'owner' of the URI, which means the registrant of the DNS entry of > > the hostname, or owner of the IP address, either of which is the > > "host" part of the URI, to make some statement regarding what the > > URI is intended _by the owner_ to mean. > >Who cares what the owner means. There's nothing to stop anyone else >using that very same URI to mean something else. That's why URIs can't >on their own convey meaning. To get that you need semantic agreement >between the producers and the consumers of the URIs. Um, this is unduly pessimistic. You are right, of course: there's absolutely nothing to stop me using the html:p element to mean "transfer lots of money to my bank account". Indeed, if you and I had a private agreement to use it that way, we could build a perfectly workable system that way. But XML is often used in a publishing context, rather than a point-to-point messaging context, and explicit private semantic agreements are neither possible nor necessary. A tacet agreement to use the meanings defined by the owner of a namespace is perfectly workable. -- Cheers, John
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