[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: Identity
* Lars Marius Garshol | | Within that fictional universe, two main approaches seem useful: | [...] * Miles Sabin | | Ahh ... OK, it looks like I shouldn't have used an example with | fictional characters. I'm not all that interested in truth in | fiction: just rerun my argument with a non-fictional example. Or, even better, you can just go back and re-read my post, noting that since I say '_Within_ that fictional universe' I effectively stop regarding it as fiction. :-) Given your last two posts on this subject (in the 'I want to parse like Superman' thread) it seems you really should read it again. You use the term 'denote' in discussing names and identity, but seem to ignore the fact that this makes some fundamental assumptions about the universe and the web, and it's not immediately obvious that these are valid. For example, you like to think that the term 'Jupiter' denotes a planet, and that this planet is a solid well-defined thing, right? Well, it's not obvious that this really is so. You're referring to a ball of gas floating in a near-vacuum, but you'd be hard pressed to find a precise border where you can say that "Here the near-vacuum ends, and Jupiter begins", since the transition from the one to the other is so gradual. And if you look at the meaning of 'Jupiter' that denotes the Roman god things get even worse, since this is an entity that as far as we know doesn't exist and whose exact alleged attributes have varied through the centuries as people's beliefs have changed. This may sound like philosophical nitpicking, but I'm not so sure that things are that much clearer on the web. For example, do these two URLs denote the same resource? <URL: http://www.stud.ifi.uio.no/~larsga/linker/XMLtools.html> <URL: http://birk105.studby.uio.no/linker/XMLtools.html> They're not byte-by-byte equal, but there certainly seems to be a connection between them. What criteria should a web robot apply to decide that they are the same resource? And when the contents you get from following a URL vary with the cookies you've set, the user-agent you use, your accept headers and your domain, what is then the resource behind all that? And what about banner ads, are they part of the resource? And how do you tell that they really are banner ads, anyway? In all these cases ('Jupiter' and the web examples) we, humans, impose a categorization on the universe we observe into distinct objects with identity and it's not really clear that this grouping into objects has any independent existence outside our heads. --Lars M. xml-dev: A list for W3C XML Developers. To post, mailto:xml-dev@i... Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/xml-dev/ and on CD-ROM/ISBN 981-02-3594-1 To (un)subscribe, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; (un)subscribe xml-dev To subscribe to the digests, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; subscribe xml-dev-digest List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa@i...)
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