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Re: more politics

• To: xml-dev@l...
• Subject: Re: more politics
• From: "Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@s...>
• Date: Thu, 24 Jul 2003 10:03:38 -0400
• In-reply-to: <20030724051849.GB1890@m...>

cowan@m... (John Cowan) writes:
>> (b) does the difference have any effect on the behavior of the
system?
>
>Definitely, since "the system" includes human beings and other
>inference-drawing machines.  

To me, this is where it gets interesting.  Part of the genius of the
original Web was that it didn't mind bad URLs - humans were part of the
system and could deal with the 404 Not Found messages themselves.
Annoying, but not likely to cause especially complicated problems.

In the Semantic Web, on the other hand, the URIs are under the covers,
with no simple "GET it and tell me an answer or give me an error".  "The
system", as it did for the Web, includes human beings and all their
interpretive and creative foibles, but not their convenient
error-handling capabilities - at least not until an awful lot of URIs
may have been processed.

The original Web was simple enough that exception handling could bubble
out to humans and there wouldn't be a huge problem.  The Semantic Web is
both a lot more complicated and its keepers try very hard to keep humans
far away, which seems like a seriously dangerous approach to me.

-- 
Simon St.Laurent
Ring around the content, a pocket full of brackets
Errors, errors, all fall down!
http://simonstl.com -- http://monasticxml.org

• Follow-Ups:
  • Re: more politics
    • From: "Jonathan Borden" <jonathan@o...>
  • Re: more politics
    • From: Rick Marshall <rjm@z...>

• References:
  • Re: more politics
    • From: John Cowan <cowan@m...>

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