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Re: URIs harmful (was RE: Article: Keeping pace wit

• To: xml-dev@l...
• Subject: Re: URIs harmful (was RE: Article: Keeping pace with James Clark)
• From: "Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@s...>
• Date: Sat, 20 Jul 2002 07:00:35 -0400
• In-reply-to: <1027140071.16096.74.camel@marajen>

Amy Lewis wrote:
> Which is to say, I don't think it's really an issue of coupling, but
> an issue of ambiguity, as Simon (and Len) originally suggested. 
> Using a form (syntax) that carries extremely heavy connotations of an
> associated semantic, and violating that semantic (here I'm not
> speaking of the location algorithm, but of case-sensitivity,
> encoding, and resolution only, mind), is just guaranteed to produce
> confusion.  Witness the 3000-message thread that Just Won't Die (and
> TBL reopened it with a suggestion that "relative URIs", an utterly
> *meaningless* concept when namespace names have been divorced from
> URI semantic (say "relative string" and "absolute string" and see
> what meaning you can discover), are not all that bad after all ...
> *sigh*).

That's an excellent summary of what concerns me in the W3C's use of
URIs.

I'm well aware of the difference between signified and signifier, and
appreciate that the looseness of the connection between them.  At the
same time, however, I recognize that reusing signifiers (or simply the
syntax used by a particular class of signifier) brings with it seemingly
infinite potential for confusion.

There are bigger problems here than the lack of a normative document for
URLs.  I like that "relative string" bit, though!
-- 
Simon St.Laurent
Ring around the content, a pocket full of brackets
Errors, errors, all fall down!
http://simonstl.com

• Follow-Ups:
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    • From: Uche Ogbuji <uche.ogbuji@f...>

• References:
  • Re: URIs harmful (was RE: Article: Keeping pace with James Clark)
    • From: Amelia A Lewis <amyzing@t...>

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