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Re: URIs harmful (?!)

• To: xml-dev@l...
• Subject: Re: URIs harmful (?!)
• From: Mike Brown <mike@s...>
• Date: Fri, 19 Jul 2002 15:03:33 -0600 (MDT)
• In-reply-to: <r01050300-1015-7D304AA69B3011D6895D0003937A08C2@[192.168.124.21]>"from Simon St.Laurent at Jul 19, 2002 11:59:21 am"

Simon St.Laurent wrote:
> At this point, I start to doubt the value of specifications when they
> use URIs rather than URLs.

Sigh. Okay, I'll bite.

I can see how using a URI for its syntax and not its semantics undermines
interoperability. But I don't see how URLs fix that. If I want an identifier,
it might be just as advantageous as it is harmful to use an identifier that
might also be usable in other contexts, be they temporal or systematic.

> The philosophy behind URIs seems designed to ward off questions
> rather than promote interoperability

Ambiguity == interoperability. You seem to be supporting your own argument. 

There is deliberate ambiguity in how we use URIs. There is ambiguity inherited
from the loose definition of resources, as well as from the lack of
constraints on degrees of identity. All this looseness promotes
interoperability (e.g., "whatever wants to call itself
'http://example.com/spam' today is spam to me, good enough").

I don't see ambiguity stemming from the fact that the URIs are identifiers, or
from whether they take the form of names or locators (which seems to be your
argument). So I don't see URIs as the problem. The philosophy behind them
doesn't seem to be suspect. Maybe I choose to use them in less interoperable
ways (e.g., namespace identifiers, or other non-dereferenceable resource
names).

I also think the whole argument is pointless. We could constrain namespace
identifiers to be ISO 8601 dates, and it wouldn't make legitimate date strings
any less meaningful, usable, or interoperable.

> God knows I'm tired of talking about this stuff,

Apparently you aren't! ;)

   - Mike
____________________________________________________________________________
  mike j. brown                   |  xml/xslt: http://skew.org/xml/
  denver/boulder, colorado, usa   |  resume: http://skew.org/~mike/resume/

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