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RE: more politics

• To: 'Mike Champion' <mc@x...>, xml-dev@l...
• Subject: RE: more politics
• From: "Bullard, Claude L (Len)" <clbullar@i...>
• Date: Thu, 24 Jul 2003 08:37:23 -0500

What is sad here is that so far not a single point 
has been raised either scientifically, philosophically, 
or from an engineering point of view that hasn't 
been raised before.  If the point is to gather 
into the architecture doc what the common view is 
of a resource, Joshua Allen said it last year, 
"it is a hypertext dispenser" which Pat generalized 
back to "it is a representation dispenser" and 
which for a possibly very large group of people, 
it is a server.  A URI itself is defined completely 
in terms of syntax just like XML, so what it 
'means' depends on who is speaking, therefore 
as has been asserted numerous times here there 
and elsewhere, the assertion that it identifies 
one and only one "thing" is as true as the 
context of use.  The problem then becomes 
how to bound the web as a system or context 
of use (system is data plus operations) such 
that all properties of that definition are 
provable and then to examine case by case
what overlaps there are with other systems 
that use the URI.

None of that is news since the 1950s.

As to the Pat as The Authority vs Tim as 
The Authority, that's a popularity contest. 
Last year's hit means nothing to this 
year's playlist except B rotation.

len

-----Original Message-----
From: Mike Champion [mailto:mc@x...]

On Wed, 23 Jul 2003 19:52:35 -0400, Simon St.Laurent 
<simonstl@s...> wrote:

> In case today's xml-dev didn't have enough political discussion of
> technical issues for you, may I strongly recommend:
>
> http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2003/07/23/deviant.html
>
> The issues are URIs and RDF, and a whole lot more.

I also recommend http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www- 
tag/2003Jul/0302.html (the latest major post by Pat Hayes in that TAG 
megathread) as a very astute conclusion to the multi-year debate on 
resources, representations, URIs, etc.:

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